FERC Blocks ComEd's Exit From PowerHouse Hillwood Data Center Deal
The ruling forces Commonwealth Edison to keep serving a campus whose owner is simultaneously fighting Microsoft at the same regulator.
Federal energy regulators have refused to let Commonwealth Edison walk away from its agreement to serve the PowerHouse Hillwood data center campus, handing the utility an order it did not ask for and the developer a customer contract it says it may not be able to perform6.
That matters for anyone underwriting load growth in the largest US power market. The dispute at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission pairs the utility, the developer and, in a separate but related filing, Microsoft, all arguing over the terms for serving planned data centers in Wisconsin and Illinois — and it lands while PJM's capacity auction has already cleared at a record $16.4 billion in June (2026-06), matching the December auction and eight times the level of a few years ago4,6.
The procedural backdrop is a mid-June (2026-06) FERC finding that grid operators must treat large loads under the rules on the books, not under ad hoc arrangements6. ComEd appears to have read that as license to exit a service agreement it no longer wanted to carry. FERC read it the other way.
PowerHouse Hillwood Holdings and Microsoft are separately in disputes at the commission over agreements setting the terms and requirements for their planned data centers in Wisconsin and Illinois, according to the FERC filings6. Those are not the same docket as the ComEd cancellation, but they turn on the same question: who holds the obligation when a hyperscaler campus does not get built on schedule, or at all.
The pressure is not isolated to Illinois. Nine Midwestern utilities petitioned FERC in April (2026-04) to suspend competitive bidding for transmission projects tied to data centers for five years, a request that Google, Microsoft, Meta and other technology companies pushed back on1. Around 55 GW of proposed solar, battery, wind and natural gas projects have cleared PJM's interconnection queue but still face permitting, financing and grid upgrade hurdles4. The generation queue is not the binding constraint. The contract terms are.
Ratepayer advocates have already told FERC that its framework for connecting data centers in PJM does not adequately shield other consumers from the transmission costs those loads create, a complaint filed by five state advocates3. ComEd's attempt to cancel is the utility-side version of the same argument: if the load does not materialise, someone has to eat the stranded cost. FERC's answer, at least here, is that the contract allocates it to the utility unless the parties renegotiate.
There is a live question about how much capacity is being left on the table by the current rules. FERC agreed with Voltus and Mission:data that PJM is losing out on at least 4.9 GW of capacity under its existing framework, capacity that could otherwise be counted during a period of unprecedented load growth5. That number sits awkwardly against a regulator that just told a utility it cannot shed a single large-load obligation. Demand-side and virtual resources remain undercounted; contracted data center load stays firmly on the books.
The commission's own posture has shifted. "This FERC is not the old sleepy agency that it has been," one observer told E&E News, in reporting on the regulator being drawn into the data center power surge2. The ComEd order fits that description. FERC is declining to let the parties solve a cost-allocation problem by unwinding paper.
For traders, the read-through is to PJM capacity and to the cost stack that data center load is building into the market, not to near-term power prices. Henry Hub front-month sat at $3.00/MMBtu and TTF front-month at €73.37/MWh on Wednesday (2026-09-23) — European gas is a switching story, not a PJM one, and the Atlantic arbitrage is what links them6. German power at €162.40/MWh reflects that same European stack6.
The near-term signal is procedural. Watch whether PowerHouse Hillwood and Microsoft amend or withdraw their separate service agreements now that FERC has shown it will hold counterparties to signed terms, and whether other PJM utilities read the ComEd order as a bar to walking away from their own large-load contracts. Any of those moves changes how much of the queue converts into firm capacity — and how much of the $16.4bn auction bill lands on data centers rather than on residential ratepayers4.