The front of the line

The interconnection queue is where American electricity goes to wait. A new power plant, a solar farm, a factory — you file to connect, and you sit. At PJM, the largest grid operator, the wait has run into years. On Thursday the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission decided one kind of customer shouldn't have to.

FERC issued six show-cause orders — one each to PJM, MISO, Southwest Power Pool, California ISO, ISO New England, and New York — giving the operators 60 days to justify their pricing for large loads or reform it, 30 days to file a reliability plan, and a target of handling new power requests within 90 days. The large loads in question are AI data centers. The order is a government-mandated fast lane, and the wire framed it without ornament: regulators told grid operators to speed power to energy-hungry data centers.

Here is the thing the announcement is careful not to say. A queue is not a pricing problem. It is a line. Moving one customer to the front does not shorten the line; it lengthens it for everyone behind. The solar developer, the new housing tract, the manufacturer who also filed and is also waiting — they do not get a 90-day clock. They get whatever is left once the data centers are seated.

Paying to connect is not the same as paying for the line.

FERC's answer to this is that data centers pay their own interconnection costs. True, and beside the point. The scarce good in a multi-year queue is not the copper and the transformers — those have a price, and the data center will cover it. The scarce good is being first: the engineering attention, the generation capacity reserved, the years you don't spend waiting. That has no invoice. The order hands it to one industry by fiat.

The honest counter is that the queue is broken and reform is overdue, which is true. The current system makes everyone wait behind speculative projects that never get built, and a regulator forcing operators to move faster is, in the abstract, good government. FERC paired the orders with language about protecting consumers and told operators to weigh alternative transmission technologies. The agency's own standard is that large loads must be able to connect:

If the result were a faster queue for all loads, this would be a different column. But a show-cause order tailored to large loads does not fix the line. It builds a second one, express, and names who rides it. The reliability reports are due in 30 days because the agency already knows the answer is strained — you do not demand a capacity plan on a month's notice for a grid with room to spare. The speed is the tell. When the state moves this fast to seat one customer, it is because the seat was always going to be contested, and it has decided who wins.

For two weeks the AI-policy story has been about the state reaching into the market to switch models off. This is the same hand, palm up. Washington is not only regulating the compute buildout; it is clearing the ground for it. And the cost of being moved to the back of the line will not arrive as a line item. It will arrive as a wait.