The Lyceum: Power & Infrastructure Weekly — Jun 20, 2026

This was the week the AI power crunch stopped being a think-piece and became a rulebook. FERC met on June 18 and didn't just nudge — it issued show-cause orders to all six U.S. regional grid operators, advanced a national interconnection rule for data-center-scale loads, and reopened its PJM co-location fight, all at once. Meanwhile Switzerland's parliament voted to undo a post-Fukushima nuclear ban, and a growing pile of evidence kept insisting that water, not just megawatts, is now the binding constraint on where the next gigawatt of compute can physically go. The throughline: the rules written for a world of generators are buckling under a world of data centers, and everyone — federal regulators, state commissions, hyperscalers, and water boards — is racing to write the next set first.

• Aggressive Targeted Action to Speed Large Load Integration (FERC): Unanimous Section 206 show-cause orders to all six RTOs, requiring them to justify or rewrite their large-load tariffs.
• GM Energy vehicle-to-grid update (General Motors): A software update lets some U.S. EV owners send power back to the grid, starting with a 30-employee DTE Energy pilot in Michigan.
• Blue e+ A2L cooling units (Rittal): Enclosure-cooling range converting to R-1234yf refrigerant to stay inside future EU F-gas limits.
• Fairwater closed-loop cooling (Microsoft): A recirculated-water cooling design at the Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin campus that Microsoft says relies on recirculated water for more than 90% of its cooling.

The most consequential U.S. power-infrastructure action of the year landed on June 18. FERC unanimously issued tailored show-cause orders under Section 206 of the Federal Power Act to all six regional transmission organizations — PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, NYISO, and ISO-NE — directing each to justify or rewrite the tariffs governing how very large new loads connect to the grid. The goal: get AI data centers, chip fabs, and EV plants connected faster while shielding other ratepayers from stranded costs if a project never materializes.

This is the enforcement teeth behind the long-running RM26-4 rulemaking, which targets interconnection reform for loads above a certain megawatt threshold — the line where federal jurisdiction kicks in and FERC can impose standardized rules on every regional operator at once. The Associated Press confirmed the thrust: projects should increasingly bring their own power or curtail during peak demand.

What changes if it works: RTOs that don't voluntarily reform get their rules rewritten for them, and the 2,600 GW interconnection queue finally gets a coherent national framework.
What failure looks like: the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners has already filed comments arguing FERC's authority "to control the terms of large load interconnection is far from clear" — a brewing federal-state jurisdictional fight. Watch whether the June action lands as a final rule or a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR); a NOPR means another comment cycle and a 2027 effective date, and the queue keeps growing under current rules through another capacity auction.

Buried under the big AI-load headline, FERC also moved on PJM's co-location docket — the plumbing beneath the entire "park a data center next to a power plant" trend. At the June 18 meeting, the commission modified and partly set aside pieces of its December 2025 PJM order, accepted some parts of PJM's compliance filing while rejecting others, established certain rates and conditions for new transmission services, and ordered fresh compliance filings within 60 days.

Co-location matters because it's the workaround hyperscalers are using to skip the congested transmission system entirely: pair the load directly with dedicated generation and you become an anchor tenant rather than a ratepayer waiting in a queue. What to watch: the 60-day compliance filings will reveal whether PJM's co-location framework is coherent or still improvising — and whether the rates FERC just set make co-location more attractive or less. If they tilt the economics against behind-the-fence deals, expect Texas's behind-the-meter pipeline to look even better by comparison.

Europe's nuclear reversal reached its most symbolically loaded chapter on Thursday, when Switzerland's National Council — the lower house of parliament — backed lifting the ban on constructing new nuclear power plants. The vote follows earlier backing from the Council of States and the federal government, aligning the full parliamentary process behind reopening the door.

The backstory is the whole point. Swiss voters approved a gradual nuclear phase-out in a 2017 referendum, a direct response to Fukushima. Nine years later, energy-security anxiety after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the math of electrification have flipped the politics. Switzerland's four reactors currently supply up to 40% of its electricity.

What this actually does: nothing immediate — there are no plans for new plants, and the move only removes the legal barrier. The Greens have announced a referendum to oppose it, which means Swiss voters decide again, likely in 2027 or 2028. The real signal: a country famous for direct democracy is willing to put nuclear back to a popular vote — a live test of whether European opinion has genuinely shifted or whether parliament is running ahead of the electorate. Watch whether the campaign becomes a template for re-authorization debates in Austria, Germany, and Spain.

NextEra Energy and Google Cloud plan to co-develop at least three gigawatt-scale data center campuses, each paired with dedicated power plants. NextEra expects to add 15 gigawatts — possibly far more — of new generation for data centers by 2035, roughly the entire generating capacity of a mid-sized U.S. state. Separately, NextEra signed 11 power purchase agreements and two storage agreements with Meta totaling over 2.5 GW, with projects coming online between 2026 and 2028.

The structural innovation is co-location: pairing compute directly with generation bypasses much of the congested transmission system. That's not a clever workaround — it's a restructuring of how hyperscalers relate to the grid, from ratepayer to anchor tenant of dedicated assets. The two also plan an AI-powered product to predict energy equipment failures and improve grid reliability.

What changes: Google becomes a power-infrastructure partner, not just a customer — and if this model scales, it's the template that routes around the interconnection logjam entirely. What to watch: whether FERC's new large-load framework treats these co-located arrangements favorably or claws them back toward standard interconnection rules. The deal is now being read through that lens, not as a standalone announcement.

Water moved from footnote to forecast this week. A large hyperscale campus using evaporative cooling — the cheapest, most common approach — can consume 3 to 5 million gallons per day, comparable to a small city. New heat-and-drought mapping found that more than half of the world's existing data centers sit in regions facing extreme heat or drought, exposing them to simultaneous grid-outage and cooling-water risk as heat waves compound with tight capacity.

This lands right after Amazon disclosed its data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year, and as drought-stressed states like Arizona and Nevada begin asking hard questions in permitting proceedings. EPA's WIFIA water-reuse pipeline is quietly staying live as a financing lane — relevant because reuse may prove easier to permit than fresh withdrawals in industrial regions.

What changes if water becomes binding: site selection gets reordered around basins, not just substations, and closed-loop cooling architectures get a sudden economic tailwind. The observable signal: whether any state water board cites data center water intensity in a permitting denial this summer — the first time water becomes a hard constraint rather than a disclosure requirement.

For years, vehicle-to-grid was the PowerPoint idea everyone loved and almost nobody wired up. Per Reuters, General Motors is now rolling out a software update enabling some U.S. EV owners with its vehicle-to-home system to send power back to the grid, starting with a pilot involving 30 employees and DTE Energy in Michigan.

Still pilot-scale, not a capacity resource you can bank on. But it matters because it drags bidirectional charging toward operational reality: interconnection rules, compensation, and battery-warranty questions all have to become boring before this scales. If they do, parked EVs become a distributed peaker plant made of driveways and fleet depots. The next signal: whether utilities move beyond employee demos into tariffed programs with explicit payment rates and export limits.

Plenty of "energy transition" stories are supply-chain stories in cleaner branding. Per Reuters, on June 16 the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital conditionally committed $500 million in long-term debt financing to Phoenix Tailings for a U.S. rare-earth midstream processing plant. Not a power project — but rare earths sit inside the permanent magnets used in EV motors, wind turbines, and defense hardware, and midstream processing is the ugly middle step the West spent years discovering it had outsourced.

A federal financing move here is the government saying decarbonization and industrial policy now share a warehouse. What to watch: this is conditional financing, not an operating plant — the real milestones are final close, construction start, and nameplate output. If Renault's parallel push toward rare-earth-free electric motors scales, the geopolitical exposure shifts again, and the calculus on this plant changes overnight.

This week: six grid operators got homework due in 60 days, Switzerland un-banned a thing it isn't planning to build, and 30 GM employees in Michigan quietly became a power plant. The data-center industry spent two years discovering it couldn't get enough electrons — and is now discovering that the easy part was the electrons, and the hard part is the water, the refrigerant in the chiller, and a roomful of state utility commissioners who think FERC's authority is "far from clear." Stay thirsty, stay grounded.

Forward this to the one person you know who already suspected the AI boom would eventually come for the municipal water supply — they were right, and they'll want the receipts.