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Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on May 7, targeting PJM Interconnection’s transmission cost allocation as unjust and unreasonable. The case number is EL26-63. The complaint asks FERC to reform how PJM spreads grid upgrade costs across its 13-state footprint — and to set May 7 as the refund-effective date.

The dollar amounts are specific. PJM’s Regional Transmission Expansion Plan has allocated $2 billion to Maryland across three successive planning cycles. Of that, $1.6 billion will flow directly onto utility bills over the next decade: $823 million from residential customers ($345 per customer), $146 million from commercial ($673 per customer), and $629 million from industrial ($15,074 per customer).

The Gap Between Who Causes the Cost and Who Pays It

PJM covers roughly 65 million people across 13 states and DC. The demand growth forcing these transmission upgrades is not evenly distributed. Northern Virginia data centers account for over 10 gigawatts of new projected load — more than the entire existing peak demand of Baltimore Gas and Electric, which serves Maryland’s largest utility territory and stands at 6.7 GW. PJM’s own load forecasts project BGE’s peak will actually decline by 2030 compared to 2024. Pepco, Maryland’s other major utility zone, is forecast to add just 5 megawatts.

In short: Maryland is being billed for grid infrastructure that it does not need and will not materially use.

The Mechanism: A Methodology Built for a Different Era

PJM’s hybrid cost allocation rule splits transmission investment costs using a combination of load-ratio share (applied regionally) and a distribution factor (DFAX) approach that assigns costs to beneficiaries. The system was designed and approved during a period of gradual, diffuse load growth — the kind where no single customer or zone could drive billions of dollars in regional transmission investment in a matter of years.

Data centers broke that assumption. “A large data center can represent more load than a midsize city and can scale up in a matter of years,” OPC’s filing told FERC. Because PJM’s methodology spreads costs across zones by geographic proximity rather than causal responsibility, Maryland customers end up subsidizing Northern Virginia buildout simply by being adjacent to it.

The Ratepayer Protection Pledge Problem

The Trump administration extracted commitments from major tech companies in early 2026 under what the White House called the “ratepayer protection pledge” — a promise that AI infrastructure buildout would not push costs onto residential utility customers. OPC’s complaint points directly at this gap: PJM’s methodology allocates costs to existing load in neighboring zones, not to the data centers causing them, regardless of what tech companies promised at a White House ceremony.

Maryland People’s Counsel David S. Lapp was direct: “PJM’s cost allocation rules are broken. Maryland customers have neither caused the need for these billions in new transmission projects, nor will they meaningfully benefit from them.”

Florida moved at the state level in parallel, with Governor Ron DeSantis signing a bill directing regulators to keep AI data center costs off residential utility bills. Maryland’s route is federal — it needs FERC to rewrite PJM’s cost allocation methodology before the next Regional Transmission Expansion Plan cycle locks in further billions.

What Maryland Wants

OPC is asking FERC to declare PJM’s hybrid methodology unjust and unreasonable as applied to large data center load growth, and to require PJM to revise its cost allocation rules to ensure that the entities causing transmission investment — or the zones where that load materially benefits — bear the costs. The complaint also flags forward risk: if the 10+ GW of projected Virginia data center demand never materializes, Maryland customers will have pre-paid for infrastructure that was never necessary.

The $22 billion figure covers PJM’s full transmission expansion program across all zones. Maryland’s $2 billion slice is not an anomaly — it is a structural output of rules that predate the data center era and have not been updated to reflect it.