The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has granted a complaint from demand-response aggregators including Mission:data and Voltus, ruling that PJM Interconnection’s requirement for smart meter data β which utilities routinely withhold citing state privacy laws β effectively blocks virtual power plants from participating in wholesale markets and strands gigawatts of flexible capacity that customers want to offer.
The dispute centers on a structural gap: PJM mandates granular meter data to verify demand-response performance, yet the utilities that control that data refuse to release it, even when customers have authorized third-party access. Other regions have resolved this tension without weakening privacy protections, suggesting the barrier is institutional rather than legal. By siding with the aggregators, FERC has signaled that market access cannot be conditioned on data the incumbent utilities have no incentive to share.
PJM argues that statistical sampling β the alternative proposed by aggregators when meter data is unavailable β would degrade settlement accuracy. But the current framework creates a catch-22: no data means no participation, and no participation means no data to validate. FERC’s next move will likely define a minimum viable data standard that satisfies verification needs without granting utilities a de facto veto over competitive resources.
The decision arrives alongside a separate win for FERC: the D.C. Circuit upheld Order 2023, the agency’s reform to accelerate generator interconnection queues. Together, the two actions reflect a broader regulatory push to remove procedural bottlenecks β whether in transmission access or data access β that keep clean, flexible resources off the grid.
Read the full report at Energy Central.