FERC large load counsel in Washington DC.

The co-location proceeding began with a show-cause order in February 2025 and produced the substantive order of 18 December 2025, in which FERC directed interconnection-path clarity, an eligible customer to take transmission service on behalf of co-located load, three new transmission products, revised behind-the-meter netting and a paper hearing on rates. Baker Botts, writing the day after, set out the compliance architecture: a filing on interconnection pathways within thirty days and tariff amendments within sixty. The compliance order of 16 April 2026 then accepted part of that filing and sent the definition of co-located load back for a further filing, as the National Law Review reported that month. And on 18 June 2026 — the same day as the six show-cause orders — FERC issued a further order on rehearing and compliance in that same co-location docket, as Holland & Knight recorded in June 2026.

The show-cause proceeding is separate, and for this operator it is expressly limited to large loads that are not co-located. So a company with both a co-located generator arrangement and a conventionally interconnected campus has two federal positions to keep consistent, in two dockets, on two clocks. Getting that wrong is not an abstract risk. It produces a company that has commented in the wrong proceeding, which is an outcome no one notices until the order arrives.

A third track opened in August. On 13 August 2026 the operator filed a proposed Interim Resource Adequacy Service together with a Large Load Registry, applying to loads of 50 MW or more at a single electrical site entering service after 1 June 2027, with agency action requested by 12 October 2026, as POWER reported that month. Registry proposals are the quiet ones. They rarely generate a client alert, and they change what a company is obliged to disclose about its own operations.

What the record decides commercially

None of this stays procedural for long, because the instruments that come out of these proceedings are contracts a company signs. Orrick recorded in July 2026 that FERC had approved a transmission security agreement between a Pennsylvania utility and a hyperscale operator’s data services arm in November 2025 for grid upgrades serving a planned campus, and five further such agreements between an Illinois utility and data center developers in March 2026. Agreements of that shape carry credit support, committed revenue, shortfall payments and termination fees sized to expected energy costs over an initial term that is often ten years. That is a balance-sheet commitment negotiated inside a federal filing, which is a sentence that should tell a chief legal officer exactly where the seat sits: not beside the treasurer, and not beside the construction lawyer, but able to talk to both before the filing goes in.

Vintage matters too, and it has an edge. FERC said in June 2026 that the show-cause orders were not intended to disrupt agreements large loads had already negotiated or were in the process of negotiating, and that operators should allow time to finalize near-complete arrangements. That protection is real and it is also a boundary: whether a specific agreement falls inside it is a question with a right answer, and someone has to give that answer in writing, contract by contract, against a date. A company that cannot say which of its arrangements are protected has not finished reading its own portfolio.

Why cost allocation turned adversarial

The reason a general counsel now finds organized opposition on the other side of these dockets is that the cost of the build has become visible on retail bills. IEEFA reported in July 2025 that regional capacity cleared at $28.92 per megawatt-day for one delivery year, then $269.92 for the next in most zones, then $329.17 for the following one; it recorded the independent market monitor attributing 63 percent of the middle increase — about $9.3 billion recovered from customers in a single delivery year — to data centers. In the District, the same analysis recorded residential bills rising about $21 a month from June 2025, of which the District’s own people’s counsel attributed roughly $10 to the capacity-price movement.

Numbers like that produce parties. Maryland’s ratepayer advocate maintains a public ledger of its interventions on this subject and filed a complaint at FERC on 7 May 2026 arguing that regional cost-allocation rules assign data-center-driven transmission costs to Maryland customers; on that office’s own figures, close to $12 billion of regional upgrades were advanced across 2024 and 2025, of which it estimates about $1.3 billion would fall on customers in its state. Those are an advocate’s numbers, and a company’s in-house holder should be able to say so precisely and then answer them — which is a different skill from being able to explain the order they appear in.

The agency itself is the largest single concentration. FERC states approximately 1,500 employees across its Washington headquarters and regional offices, and its general counsel described the office as hiring in an Energy Bar Association interview published in August 2026; the same interview records 977 voted orders and 29 fully litigated appeals in 2025. Agency lawyers arrive with the record in their heads and no experience of choosing a commercial position. The grid operator’s own legal department is the second source, and it is small, sits partly outside the city, and is the counterparty in the proceeding a hiring company wants to influence, which raises questions a general counsel should ask early rather than late.

The third source is the utility federal desks — the assistant general counsel and managing attorney seats described above. These are the closest analogue to the job being hired: internal, position-holding, panel-managing. They are also the hardest to move, because the person occupying one already has the thing candidates in this market ask for first, which is authority over the file. The fourth is the Washington energy regulatory bar itself, where the depth is real and the transition risk is the standard one: an excellent adviser is not automatically an owner, and the difference shows up in the first week rather than the first year.

Two adjacent pools are commonly mistaken for this one. Construction, procurement and infrastructure counsel at large technology employers in this city are busy, well paid and genuinely necessary, and they do not hold tariff records. Environmental and land-use counsel sit on a different internal team at every employer we reviewed. Naming Loudoun County’s special-exception regime or Frederick County’s development pause in the same requisition as a federal docket does not create one lawyer who can do both; it creates a search that will produce two shortlists and no hire.