A watchdog for the nation’s largest electricity grid is urging federal regulators to reject the sale of a Maryland power plant, arguing the transaction could worsen an already tightening supply picture if the plant’s output is diverted to serve data centers instead of staying available to the broader grid. The objection was filed by Monitoring Analytics, PJM Interconnection’s independent market monitor, in a submission to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
The disputed deal involves the Morgantown Generating Station in Maryland. Monitoring Analytics is challenging the proposed sale to TeraWulf Inc., a company that operates as a bitcoin miner and data center developer. TeraWulf announced the acquisition in February and described Morgantown as having about 200 megawatts of operational generation capacity, with the potential to expand to roughly 1,000 megawatts—a scale that TeraWulf said could power about 750,000 homes.
The market monitor’s concern isn’t just about ownership—it’s about what happens to the electricity after the sale. Monitoring Analytics warned that, at a time of “shrinking electricity supplies” in the PJM region, Morgantown’s power could be pulled out of the competitive wholesale market and effectively reserved for data center use. That would reduce supply available to all other customers and could intensify price and reliability pressures across the PJM footprint, which spans a large portion of the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest and South.
Those concerns are amplified by the broader backdrop: rapid growth in data center demand—driven by AI, cloud computing, and crypto—has become a major political and regulatory issue. Rising data center demand (current and forecasted) has helped push up power bills in PJM, prompting multiple responses from the White House, governors and PJM itself, including proposals that data centers build or otherwise supply new power to cover their consumption rather than lean on constrained grids.
Monitoring Analytics argued that the deal also lacks essential transparency. In its filing, the monitor said TeraWulf has not disclosed enough detail about how it plans to operate or expand Morgantown, including whether expansion would rely on restarting retired units, building entirely new generation, or modifying existing interconnection rights. Without those specifics, the monitor said it’s impossible to evaluate whether the project would actually add “incremental supply” to the grid or simply re-label existing capability for private data-center demand.
Because of those uncertainties, the market monitor urged FERC to require more disclosures before approving the sale, and to require TeraWulf to commit that Morgantown’s electricity will remain available to the PJM market rather than being removed for internal or contracted data-center use.
In short, the dispute is a test case for a growing national tension: as data centers hunt for guaranteed power, regulators and grid watchdogs are increasingly focused on whether new deals add generation to the system—or quietly reallocate existing power away from everyone else.
