“Ideas have consequences. Even new pathbreaking ones that are shaking the foundations of the Federal Power Act of 1938 and state public utility regulation.”
The Department of Energy has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to federalize and streamline the connection of large data centers to the interstate transmission grid. DOE last week (Oct. 23) sent FERC a 16-page draft notice of proposed rule making, asking the commission to enact the new, unprecedented rule by the end of April, which is unlikely.
Under the DOE proposal, FERC would take over interconnection decisions for “large load” data centers, defined as those with a load of 20 MW or greater. These decisions are now made by regional transmission organizations, such as the PJM Interconnection, or by state regulatory agencies.
The DOE proposed rule states:
…In light of the unprecedented current and expected growth of large loads seeking to interconnect to the transmission system, and to provide open access and non discriminatory access to the transmission system, it has become necessary to standardize interconnection procedures and agreements for such loads, including those seeking to share a point of interconnection with new or existing generation facilities (hybrid facilities).
“A few states are bucking the national trend to prop up, temporarily, EV production. Domestic output is falling, which leaves foreign EV makers. The states do not have the federal “buy American” limit that applies to the batteries and internals of qualified EVs, however, which means that Japan’s Toyota bZ4x and Belgium’s Volvo’s EX30 could be the subsidized winners in an overall declining market.”
Biden administration $7,500 tax subsidy for purchasing electric vehicles, which helped propel a boom in battery electric vehicles (EVs), expired effective October 1st pursuant to the Big Beautiful Bill. Trump has long professed a distaste for this automotive technology, except for his EV photo-op in July when he turned the White House south lawn into a new car lot for Tesla cars to promote Elon and DOGE.…
“ENTRA1’s website is a cyber Potemkin village, all façade with no reality. The site has buttons bragging: ‘drawing on 45+ years of experience’ … ‘portfolio experience of ~6B$ in energy and infrastructure projects’, … ‘delivering on a ~30GW SMR project pipeline.’ Click on those boxed claims for further information and the result is literally nothing.”
When the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced this month that it had reached a mammoth deal — financial and timing details unspecified — to acquire 6,000 MW (6 GW) of purchased power from a wide array of NuScale small modular reactors to be owned by ENTRA1–it produced some head-scratching.
What the heck is ENTRA1? It’s not an easy question to answer, although online sleuthing provides some useful details. The name first surfaced in the fall of 2023, when NuScale announced a sketchy deal with an Ohio data center developer with ENTRA1 described as NuScale’s partner with exclusive rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by NuScale’s SMRs.…