FirstEnergy's Contracted Data Center Demand Nearly Doubled This Year. It Also Told FERC: Make Them Pay Their Own Way.

On October 28th, on a conference call most of the country never hears, FirstEnergy CEO Brian Tierney told investors something utility executives don't get to say very often. "We continue to see strong interest from data center companies, with contracted and pipelined demand up nearly 60% since year-end, including a 90% increase in contracted demand," he said. The second number is the one that matters. Pipeline interest is cheap to announce; every utility earnings call this year has a slide full of gigawatts still sitting in somebody's interconnection queue, unsigned and reversible. A 90% jump in demand that's actually under contract, backed by a signed agreement rather than a hopeful phone call, is a different kind of claim, and it's the kind FirstEnergy's own books now have to support, quarter after quarter, in front of analysts who will notice if the number quietly shrinks.

They do. FirstEnergy's core earnings came in at $0.98 a share for the third quarter, up from $0.83 a year earlier and ahead of Wall Street's $0.90 estimate, with GAAP earnings of $0.96. The company now counts 7.9 gigawatts of data center load under contract through 2036, up from 6.4 gigawatts just one quarter earlier, inside a longer-run pipeline, contracted plus everything still in active talks, that Tierney put at roughly 26 gigawatts across the company's Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia territory. He added that the hyperscalers and developers his teams are talking to are planning well past the first wave of projects due online around 2030, which is a company describing a ten-year backlog, not a one-quarter headline.

The utility asking to be told no

What separates this story from a routine earnings beat is what FirstEnergy is doing with the leverage that demand gives it. In June, the company petitioned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to require data centers to pay the full cost of the transmission upgrades their interconnections require, instead of spreading that cost across every other ratepayer in its PJM territory the way transmission build-out has traditionally been billed. FirstEnergy's own estimate puts that cost at roughly $250 million for every additional gigawatt of new load. The company has also pushed back on part of PJM's proposed data-center "backstop" capacity procurement plan, arguing that large-load customers should be contracting directly with the utilities serving them rather than leaning on a grid-wide backstop mechanism everyone else helps fund.

I think that's worth taking seriously precisely because it cuts against FirstEnergy's own short-term interest. A utility that successfully shifts interconnection costs onto the customers causing them gives up a routine way utilities have long grown their rate base: built infrastructure, spread across everyone, recovered with a guaranteed return. Asking a federal regulator to close that door on yourself is a stronger signal than a voluntary pledge with no enforcement behind it, and it's the same basic fight this blog has tracked playing out state by state, from Virginia's new GS-5 rate class to DTE's contract terms with Google in Michigan. FirstEnergy is trying to get the answer locked in at the federal level instead of relitigating it in every state commission one at a time.

Maidsville is where the promise meets a power plant

West Virginia is the clearest place to watch whether that philosophy survives contact with an actual project. Pipeline demand in the state has grown roughly sixfold since January, to nearly 6 gigawatts, and FirstEnergy's two West Virginia utilities, Mon Power and Potomac Edison, filed with the state Public Service Commission in February for a certificate of need to build the Maidsville Energy Generating Facility: a 1,200-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant on a 35-acre site next to their existing Fort Martin Power Station, alongside 70 megawatts of new solar at three other sites. Estimated cost runs $2.5 to $2.8 billion depending on which PSC filing you read, with site work able to start as early as 2027 and the plant coming online in late 2031 if approved. The commission has until February 2027 to rule, under a case file the companies have asked the PSC to treat as urgent.

The companies are also weighing whether to build it through a separate generation affiliate, a structure the industry calls a GenCo, modeled on one NiSource already runs in Indiana. Under that approach, Mon Power or Potomac Edison would buy the plant's output through a wholesale power agreement with an affiliated generation company, rather than folding the plant directly into the rate base every West Virginia customer pays into. If the data center or data centers the plant is built for sign a "fully bundled" agreement to take that power, the structure is meant to keep the risk of this one customer's bet off everyone else's bill, the same goal FirstEnergy is chasing at FERC, just built with a different tool, one state regulator's approval away from being real instead of theoretical.

It's a genuinely useful mechanism, and it's still unproven here. At a July public hearing on the project, West Virginia regulators received 662 letters of opposition, described by local coverage as overwhelmingly identical form letters, and no one spoke in favor of the plant. A coalition of consumer and environmental groups has separately urged the PSC to reject a surcharge meant to help fund it, arguing the underlying data-center demand behind the plant is still too speculative to put on a rate base before a signed, named customer is on the record. That argument sits awkwardly next to FirstEnergy's own 90%-contracted-demand number from the same earnings call, and the gap between those two claims, company-wide demand that's real and specific-plant demand that local groups say isn't proven yet, is exactly the kind of thing a public hearing exists to sort out.

There's a broader backdrop here worth naming. West Virginia's 2025 High Impact Data Center Program, created by HB 2014, set up the state's framework for siting these projects and also raised the required coal stockpile and minimum operating capacity at Mon Power's and Appalachian Power's existing coal plants, a provision both utilities say will cost them eight figures or more. That's not a footnote. It means West Virginia isn't writing data-center policy on a blank slate; it's writing it while also propping up a coal fleet the same law treats as part of the bargain, which gives the state's regulators a more tangled set of interests to balance than a state starting from scratch would have. That's a different starting point than Pennsylvania, where FirstEnergy's Pennsylvania utility is already operating under a statewide large-load tariff framework the PUC adopted in April, or Maryland, where Potomac Edison's own large-load tariff filing for Frederick County is still sitting unfiled while a political fight plays out over a different data center entirely. Three states, one utility family, three different stages of answering the same question about who pays.

What actually settles this isn't the earnings call. It's whether the West Virginia PSC approves Maidsville and the GenCo structure that's supposed to ring-fence it, on a timeline that holds to February, and whether the customer behind it ever gets named in the public record the way the opposition at that hearing has been asking for. FirstEnergy has built a genuinely strong case this quarter that its data center demand is real money, not a slide deck. Whether West Virginia ratepayers end up protected from the plant built to serve it is still a question for a regulator, not a transcript.