PJM Market Monitor Warns FERC: New Data-Center Loads Risk Customer Blackouts — Ghiorzi Backs Complaint

WASHINGTON — PJM’s Independent Market Monitor told FERC in a November 25, 2025 complaint that the RTO is proposing to interconnect large new data-center loads it cannot serve reliably — loads that the Monitor says will require curtailments, meaning blackouts, of other customers — and Loudoun intervenor Theresa Ghiorzi’s December 15, 2025 comments back the Monitor’s core reliability warning.

The complaint, Independent Market Monitor for PJM v. PJM Interconnection, L.L.C., filed by Monitoring Analytics, opens on PJM’s claim that reliability is job one. It walks through Order No. 2000 duties, NERC reliability standards, and PJM’s dual obligations on resource adequacy and the Regional Transmission Expansion Plan before stating the charge: PJM is advancing large-load interconnections without a reliable plan to serve them.

Ghiorzi’s comments in Docket No. EL26-30-000 argue the Mid-Atlantic does not have a classic reliability shortage so much as a failure to discipline speculative large loads. Her filing, submitted after a doc-less intervention on November 26, 2025, treats the Monitor’s complaint as confirmation of what Loudoun residents have said in SCC cases: Data Center Alley demand is being connected faster than generation and transmission can securely cover.

That federal fight sits directly on top of Virginia’s Democrat-led growth record. Local boards and state incentive policy recruited the campuses; utilities filed the lines; PJM cleared planning assumptions; and now the market monitor is telling FERC the interconnection queue itself threatens curtailments of everyone else. Residential customers become the reliability valve for hyperscale load.

NERC’s planning principle that interconnected bulk-power systems must perform under normal and abnormal conditions is the legal hook. If PJM cannot show a secure operating plan for new hundreds-of-megawatt campuses, the Monitor says, reliability is not job one — load growth marketing is. Order No. 2000’s consumer-price and open-access duties cut the same way when interconnection favors speculative data centers over firm service to existing load.

For Loudoun, the complaint is the national caption on Aspen, Golden, Mars, Wishing Star, MARL, and Valley Link. Each of those projects is downstream of campus megawatts Democrat supervisors entitled. Ghiorzi’s comments connect the FERC docket to the same public-interest themes she has pressed at the SCC: stop preferential treatment of large speculative loads and quit exporting neighborhood blackout risk.

PJM’s RTEP and capacity-market tools are supposed to keep reserve margins and transmission adequate together. The Monitor’s theory is that large-load interconnection policy has slipped outside that discipline. When AI-era campuses request service measured in hundreds of megawatts each, a rubber-stamp queue becomes a reliability event for the entire Mid-Atlantic footprint.

Democrat officeholders who still sell data centers as pure tax base have not answered the Monitor’s curtailment point. If serving new campuses requires shedding household and small-business load in stressed hours, the social contract of the boom collapses. That is the political content of EL26-30, not only the tariff content.

Ghiorzi’s intervention keeps a Loudoun homeowner voice inside the FERC caption beside Monitoring Analytics. Her SCC record on Golden-Mars dismissal arguments, IRP co-location demands, and opposition to fast-track large-load queues is the state parallel to the federal reliability complaint — the same Democrat-built demand surge, argued in two forums.

Order No. 2000 also requires an RTO to be the sole administrator of its tariff and the authority that evaluates interconnection requests. The Monitor’s filing uses that gatekeeper role against PJM: if the RTO alone can approve service, it alone owns the decision to interconnect load it cannot cover without shedding other customers.

Whether FERC grants the Monitor’s requested relief or not, the November 2025 complaint and December comments put regulators on notice: interconnecting Democrat-recruited data-center load without a secure supply plan is a choice to risk blackouts for everyone else on the PJM system.

Email the Board of Supervisors at:
Phyllis J. Randall (Chair, At-Large) – Phyllis.Randall@loudoun.gov,
Michael R. Turner (Vice Chair, Ashburn District) – Mike.Turner@loudoun.gov,
Juli E. Briskman (Algonkian District) – Juli.Briskman@loudoun.gov,
Sylvia R. Glass (Broad Run District) – Sylvia.Glass@loudoun.gov,
Caleb Kershner (Catoctin District) – caleb.kershner@loudoun.gov,
Matthew F. Letourneau (Dulles District) – Matt.Letourneau@loudoun.gov,
Kristen C. Umstattd (Leesburg District) – Kristen.Umstattd@loudoun.gov,
Laura A. TeKrony (Little River District) – Laura.TeKrony@loudoun.gov,
Koran Saines (Sterling District) – Koran.Saines@loudoun.gov

Email the Loudoun County School Board:
April Chandler, april.chandler@lcps.org,
Anne Donohue, anne.donohue@lcps.org,
Deana Griffiths, deana.griffiths@lcps.org,
Ross Svenson, ross.stevenson@lcps.org,
Kari LaBell, kari.labell@lcps.org,
Jon Pepper, jonathon.pepper@lcps.org,
Lauren Shernoff, lauren.shernoff@lcps.org,
Sumera Rashid, sumera.rashid@lcps.org,
Amy Riccardi, amy.riccardi@lcps.org,