July 20, 2026 | Source: Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — Item E-1, Docket No. RD26-7-000, July 16, 2026 Open Meeting
FERC Orders NERC To Write Reliability Standards for Data Center Loads by Year-End
At its July 16 open meeting, FERC issued an order directing NERC to develop and submit new or modified Reliability Standards addressing the reliability risks of integrating computational loads — data centers and similar facilities — into the Bulk-Power System.
The directive was issued under section 215(d)(5) of the Federal Power Act. That is the same rarely-used authority FERC leaned on to force mandatory cold weather and geomagnetic disturbance standards.
The order also directs NERC to revise its Rules of Procedure — including registry criteria for computational load entities. Both deliverables are due by December 31, 2026.
The Compliance Registry Is About To Get Bigger
Read that second directive again. Registry criteria for computational load entities means NERC has been told to define when a data center itself — not just the utility serving it — lands in the compliance registry. Load-side facilities have never faced that treatment at this scale.
Expect the standards work to reach large-load ride-through behavior, modeling data, and planning study requirements — the same risks NERC flagged in its Level 3 Alert and large-load reliability guideline this summer. Reliability coordinators, transmission planners, and planning coordinators should assume new data obligations are coming their way.
The clock is the real story. Five and a half months is lightning fast for standards development — expect expedited SARs, compressed ballot windows, and heavy drafting activity through Q3 and Q4. If your utility wants a voice in what operators and planners will live with for the next decade, get into the ballot pool now. And note this runs parallel to FERC's June show cause orders on large-load interconnection tariffs: market rules and reliability standards are now moving on the same problem at the same time.
EPG Solutions Can Help
When these standards land, boards and regulators will ask the same question of every utility fielding large-load requests: where do you stand against your peers on data center readiness — interconnection posture, study practices, compliance exposure? That is exactly the question EPG Solutions benchmark intelligence reports were built to answer, before the audit or the board meeting forces it. Visit EPG Solutions → epgsolutions.services