FERC keeps Oklo's 750-MW Virginia project out of PJM's queue

FERC rejected Oklo's complaint against PJM Interconnection on Thursday, declining to return a 750-megawatt Virginia project to the grid operator's current interconnection study cycle on procedural grounds: Oklo failed to show that PJM violated its tariff when it withdrew the project in early August, and did not resolve flaws in its application that PJM staff had identified.

The project would connect at two Dominion Energy substations between Washington, D.C., and Richmond, and, according to Oklo's complaint, mixes 150 megawatts of advanced nuclear, 300 megawatts of fuel cells and 300 megawatts of gas-fired generation into a single application; losing the cycle would delay it by at least 18 months and raise its cost.

FERC's order still told PJM that meeting growing regional demand requires it to collaborate with developers before, during and after the application process so that guidance and expectations are clearly understood, though none of that reopens the cycle. Oklo can fix the application and enter PJM's next study cycle, or take the Expedited Interconnection Track, whose window stays open until Dec. 31, 2027.

Oklo is not the only developer fighting those withdrawals: five other complaints are pending at FERC, brought by Advantage Capital Renewables, Agilitas Energy, Current Hydro, Lanyard Power Holdings and RWE Americas, each contending that PJM improperly dropped projects from the same cycle. The commission's reasoning here likely becomes the template for those dockets, which gives a procedural ruling an audience well beyond the 750 megawatts at stake. Pennsylvania regulators are already moving to price data-center access to that same grid, so Oklo's megawatts are now competing with load as much as with other generators.

As this publication has argued, power rights are the underwriting document now, and the queue and the utility tariff decide what gets built before capital does. This order is that argument stripped to its mechanics: FERC never weighed Oklo's reactor; it weighed the application, and a project split across nuclear, fuel cells and gas handed the grid operator three sets of assumptions to test. The design that hedged nuclear construction risk also multiplied the paperwork risk that cost it a cycle.

Oklo is commercializing metal-fueled fast reactors under its Aurora design, sized between 15 and 75 megawatts, so a 150-megawatt nuclear tranche implies more than one unit and the gas and fuel-cell blocks around it read as a bridge to first power. The choice ahead is narrow and dated: refile into the next cycle and absorb the 18 months, or take the expedited track before its window closes at the end of 2027.