FERC Chair Addresses Large Load Forecasting
September 25, 2025
At last week’s open meeting, FERC Chair David Rosner addressed what is becoming the issue in electricity demand. “Put simply, we cannot efficiently plan the electric generation and transmission needed to serve new customers if we don’t forecast how much energy they will need as accurately as possible,” Rosner said.
Rosner was addressing the changing energy landscape as regions see significant electricity demand growth to power artificial intelligence and the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing.
Rosner described load forecasting as a critical but often overlooked tool. “At a time when utilities forecast hundreds or thousands of megawatts of growth, improving forecasts by even a few percentage points in the right direction—up or down—can impact billions of dollars in investments and customer bills.”
In his statement, Rosner identified data centers as large loads that have characteristics that call for new and improved forecasting methods. “Given the size and volume of new large load interconnection requests, I’m optimistic that utilities have an opportunity to apply similar criteria to those currently used to assess the commercial readiness of large projects in the generator interconnection queue. These objective criteria include observable milestones such as contracts, financial security deposits, and physical site control.”
To help the Commission support these efforts and promote best practices across the country, Rosner proposed a dialogue on the following questions:
