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№ 23 · appended

FERC orders PJM to accept statistical sampling for demand response, routing around a utility metering-data blockade

Whoever holds the measurement holds the market. A slow answer to a metering-data request excludes a competitor more quietly than any written rule, and PJM’s own answer shows the mechanisms: two-factor authentication, secondary-user enrolment, batch limits. What makes the ruling worth reading twice is that FERC threw out a nearly identical complaint from CPower in 2024, then told the industry in that same order what evidence would win. Voltus spent two years collecting it. The door is open, and the admission price is a multi-year documentation exercise only a well-funded aggregator can afford. Note also what FERC did not do: it compelled no utility to release anything, because it has no jurisdiction to. It let aggregators estimate around the gatekeeper rather than disciplining it. The instrument still belongs to the incumbent.

FERC has told PJM to let demand-response aggregators estimate what they cannot measure. It is the same complaint the Commission threw out in 2024, and the thing that changed is the evidence, not the ownership of the meter.

In late July 2026 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted a complaint brought by the demand-response aggregator Voltus and the advocacy coalition Mission:data, and directed PJM Interconnection to accept statistical sampling as a way of measuring residential demand response even at homes that already have an interval meter installed. Canary Media, reporting the ruling on 13 August 2026, records FERC's finding that sampling is "a valid method to approximate load reductions" where interval meter data is not reasonably available, and reports FERC putting the capacity shut out of the market by the existing rule at at least 4.9 GW. PJM has 45 days from the order to bring stakeholders an initial implementation plan.

[UNVERIFIED: the order date. The eLibrary accession number cited by Canary Media, 20260729-3077, implies issuance on 29 July 2026, but FERC's eLibrary returned no readable document and its news pages returned HTTP 403, so neither the date nor a paragraph citation was read from the order itself. The 4.9 GW figure is FERC's finding as reported by Canary Media, not read from the order.]

What the rule actually said

PJM's tariff has never banned statistical sampling. It confined it. Under Attachment K-Appendix section 8.3, a curtailment service provider may estimate load reductions from a statistically significant sample only for residential customers who do not have an interval meter. Where an interval meter exists, actual metered data is required. PJM introduced that exception itself, in a filing of 4 June 2015 in docket ER15-1849, and the logic at the time was straightforward: forcing an aggregator to install an interval meter at every participating home would price residential demand response out of the market, so let it meter a sample instead.

Advanced metering infrastructure then inverted the exception. As utilities rolled out smart meters, households migrated out of the sampling carve-out and into the metered-data requirement. The meter was now there. The data it produced belonged to the distribution utility.

The obstacles, as PJM itself described them

Voltus and Mission:data filed their complaint on 8 October 2025 in docket EL26-4, under section 206 of the Federal Power Act, cataloguing the process each utility imposed on an aggregator trying to collect data its own customers had authorised it to receive. PJM's answer of 28 October 2025 summarises the catalogue while dismissing it: two-factor authentication at ComEd, a two-step verification process at PECO, a requirement in PSE&G territory that each customer log in and add Voltus as a secondary user, and limits on how many accounts can be pulled at once.

Canary Media reported in June 2026 that Voltus enrolled roughly 20,000 ComEd customers and got about 4 per cent of them through the utility's data system, some 23 MW of the total. It reported PSE&G handling requests by individual email with two to four week turnarounds, and Exelon barring third-party demand-response firms from the electronic data interchange platforms its utilities run. Mission:data's president Michael Murray told the outlet that utilities are "using meter data as a competitive weapon." Voltus's Emily Orvis said gigawatts of capacity are "stranded because of this data-access issue." Against that, Canary put the sunk cost of the metering estate at nearly $6 billion for around 12 million meters across PJM's 13-state footprint: an asset ratepayers financed and cannot direct.

PJM's defence was jurisdictional, and it was not frivolous

PJM did not argue the obstacles were imaginary. It argued they were somebody else's. Its answer says access to retail interval data is a matter for the Relevant Electric Retail Regulatory Authority, meaning the state commission, because the meter is retail equipment under state jurisdiction; that the complainants had not shown they had asked those commissions first; and that several of the withholding practices are anchored in state consumer-protection law on customer data, citing among others 52 Pa. Code section 57.174(a) and N.J. Admin. Code section 14:4-7.8. It characterised the relief sought as "a regression in the accuracy of demand response data," and argued that the complaint was a collateral attack on FERC's own earlier approval of PJM's Order 2222 metering rules, which permit sampling on the same restricted terms.

PJM also had precedent, because it had won this case before. Enerwise Global Technologies, trading as CPower, filed a substantially similar complaint on 28 September 2023 in docket EL23-104. FERC denied it on 19 September 2024, holding that CPower "offered no support for the broad assertions" that it could not obtain the data, and expressly declining to reach the question of whether a rule that leaves utility-affiliated aggregators with data their competitors cannot get is unduly discriminatory.

Why it matters

Read the two cases together and the 2026 ruling looks less like a change of mind than a receipt. The 2024 denial contained an invitation: at paragraph 36 the Commission said it would consider "specific, demonstrable evidence that electric distribution companies are unwilling or unable to provide" the metering data. Voltus and Mission:data spent the following two years assembling exactly that, utility by utility and portal by portal. The precedent this sets is therefore narrower and more expensive than it looks. It says the door opens on evidence, and that the admission price is a multi-year documentation exercise. A small aggregator with an identical problem does not have that budget, and the barrier it faces is unchanged.

More significant is what FERC did not do. It ordered nothing of a single distribution utility. It could not: the utilities were not respondents, and retail data access sits with state regulators. So the remedy routes around the gate rather than opening it. The instrument that proves a household turned down its load still belongs to the incumbent, the incumbent's own curtailment arm still reads it directly, and the competitor now infers from a sample. That is a workable outcome and a revealing one. The cheapest way to keep a competitor out of a market is not a rule against them. It is to own the thing that proves they performed, and then to answer their data request slowly.

The accuracy objection deserves better than dismissal, because PJM's version of it is coherent. Sampling is an estimate, interval data is a measurement, and PJM settles real money against whichever it receives. Reported accounts of the order say FERC credited evidence that sampling across large populations of homes can match metered data for accuracy, which is a defensible claim about aggregates and a much weaker one about any individual household. [UNVERIFIED: FERC's reasoning on sampling accuracy is taken from Canary Media's account of the order, not from the order text.] Whether the standard that emerges preserves that property is the live question, and it is now being worked out in a stakeholder process run by the party that lost.

What is still unknown

  • The order's date, citation and paragraph numbering, none of which were read from the docket.
  • Whether PJM has sought rehearing.
  • Whether PJM opened the stakeholder proceeding inside the 45 days, and what it has tabled.
  • Whether FERC set the sampling methodology or left it to the stakeholder process to define, and what accuracy standard applies.
  • Whether the relief reaches small commercial load behind the same data problem, or residential only.
  • Whether any distribution utility faces consequences, or whether the workaround simply lets the withholding continue.

Sources

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