TL;DR · 30-second read

The Short Version

Oklo, a company developing small nuclear reactors to power data centers, says the organisation that runs the electricity grid across much of the eastern United States removed its project from the waiting list for a grid connection.

Oklo has asked federal energy regulators in Washington to step in and reverse that decision.

Why it matters: the computing sites behind artificial intelligence need huge amounts of round-the-clock electricity, and new nuclear plants are one proposed answer. They only work if they can get into the queue for a grid connection and stay there.

RTO Insider reported that advanced nuclear developer Oklo has filed a complaint at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) after PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states plus the District of Columbia, removed one of Oklo’s projects from its interconnection queue — the formal waiting list every new power plant must pass through before it can connect to the transmission system.

The complaint puts a federal regulator, rather than the grid operator, in charge of deciding whether the removal was consistent with PJM’s tariff. For Oklo, a pre-revenue company whose business model is selling electricity from reactors it owns and operates, queue standing is not a paperwork detail: it is the gate between a site plan and a saleable megawatt.

Executive Summary

The dispute is narrow on its face and consequential underneath. Interconnection queues were designed for conventional generators — gas plants, wind farms, solar arrays — that submit a request, hold a position, fund studies and reach commercial operation on a broadly predictable schedule. Advanced nuclear developers arrive with a different profile: long federal licensing timelines, first-of-a-kind designs, and in many cases a single named data center customer rather than a plan to sell into the wholesale market.

That mismatch is what makes the filing worth watching. If a queue administrator can remove an advanced nuclear project because it does not fit the milestones a queue was built to enforce, the practical route to nuclear-powered computing narrows considerably. If FERC finds the removal was inconsistent with the tariff, the ruling becomes a reference point for every reactor developer negotiating with a regional grid operator.

Neither outcome is guaranteed, and complaints of this kind are frequently resolved on procedural grounds that decide little beyond the case at hand. But the question underneath — how a grid built around large central generators accommodates purpose-built reactors serving concentrated digital load — is now in front of the regulator that will ultimately have to answer it.

The Queue Is the Real Bottleneck

An interconnection queue is a waiting list with legal force. Before any generator can deliver power onto the transmission grid, the grid operator must study how that injection affects voltage, stability and congestion, and determine what network upgrades the project must pay for. Position in the queue determines study order, cost allocation and, in practice, whether a project reaches commercial operation this decade or the next.

PJM’s queue has been among the most congested in the country. The operator has moved from a first-come, first-served process to a cycle-based approach that studies projects in clusters, tightened financial and site-control requirements, and worked through a large backlog of pending requests — all while facing the fastest load growth its territory has seen in a generation, much of it from data centers. Rules that screen out speculative applications are the direct consequence of that congestion, and they were not written with first-of-a-kind reactors in mind.

The tension is structural rather than adversarial. A queue administrator enforcing readiness milestones is doing what stakeholders asked for. A nuclear developer whose regulatory path runs through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on a schedule it does not control will struggle to demonstrate readiness on a timetable calibrated to combined-cycle gas.

Behind the Meter, In Front of the Regulator

Much of the appeal of pairing reactors with data centers rests on co-location: siting generation next to the load so power flows directly to the customer rather than across the public grid. In industry shorthand this is ‘behind the meter’. It promises speed, because it appears to avoid the transmission upgrades that make grid connection slow, and it promises firm, carbon-free supply, which is what large computing operators say they want.

The regulatory reality has proven less accommodating. FERC’s 2024 rejection of an amended interconnection agreement covering an expanded co-located data center at the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania established that co-location is not a way around the grid operator; it is a matter the grid operator and the federal regulator both get to weigh in on. The unresolved questions — who pays for the transmission service a co-located load still relies on, what happens when the on-site generator trips, whether the arrangement shifts costs to other ratepayers — are why these arrangements keep arriving at FERC rather than being settled bilaterally.

Oklo’s complaint lands in that context. Whatever its specific merits, it asks the same underlying question the co-location docket asks: what obligations attach to generation built for one customer, and who decides.

What a Complaint Actually Buys

Filing at FERC gives Oklo a forum, a public record and a decision-maker with authority over PJM’s tariff. It also imposes costs. Complaint proceedings invite answers from the respondent and interventions from utilities, states, consumer advocates and rival developers; they can take months; and they can end in an order that resolves the immediate dispute without establishing the broader principle the filer wanted. For a company whose valuation rests substantially on the credibility of its development pipeline, a public dispute over queue standing is a signal customers and investors will read closely in both directions — as evidence of a real project worth fighting for, or as evidence that the path to power delivery is less settled than a pipeline chart suggests.

The wider audience is everyone else building this trade. Other advanced nuclear developers, hyperscale operators evaluating PJM sites, and independent power producers weighing co-located deals all need to know whether queue rules will bend to accommodate long-lead-time nuclear or whether nuclear will have to bend to the queue. An adverse ruling would push more projects toward markets and utilities outside PJM’s footprint, or toward structures that keep the reactor entirely off the transmission system. A favourable one would not shorten Nuclear Regulatory Commission timelines, but it would remove one source of uncertainty from an already long list.

The measured reading is that this case is a data point, not a verdict. No reactor gets built faster because of a FERC docket, and no data center gets powered by a queue position. What a ruling can do is tell the next developer what the rules are before it spends the money.

Background

Oklo Inc. is a US advanced nuclear developer that listed publicly through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in 2024 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange. Its Aurora design is a small fast reactor intended to be deployed in clusters, and its commercial model differs from traditional vendors: rather than selling reactors to utilities, Oklo intends to build, own and operate plants and sell the electricity under long-term contracts. That model makes the company a market participant subject to grid interconnection rules, not merely an equipment supplier. Its licensing path has been iterative — an earlier application was denied without prejudice in 2022 — and no Oklo plant is yet in commercial operation.

PJM, meanwhile, has spent several years managing an interconnection queue overwhelmed by requests while facing demand growth driven substantially by data centers in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. It replaced its serial queue process with a cluster-based one, added financial and site-control requirements to filter speculative applications, and has seen capacity prices climb sharply as supply retirements outpaced new entry. Those two trajectories — a nuclear developer that needs a grid position and a grid operator rationing them — are what meet in this complaint.

Source: Oklo Files FERC Complaint After PJM Removes Project from Interconnection Queue — RTO Insider’s report that advanced nuclear developer Oklo has taken PJM’s removal of its project from the interconnection queue to federal energy regulators.