American Electric Power is publicly weighing withdrawal from two of the country’s largest wholesale power markets — PJM Interconnection and the Southwest Power Pool — citing the slow pace at which new generation gets studied, approved and connected to the grid, according to a report published by Utility Dive on 6 May 2026.
AEP is among the largest transmission owners in PJM and a long-standing SPP member through its Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas operating companies. The available source material is headline-level: it indicates AEP is examining an exit, not that the company has filed a withdrawal notice with federal regulators or set a date.
Executive Summary
Regional transmission organizations, or RTOs, are the independent bodies that run the high-voltage grid and wholesale power markets across most of the eastern United States. Utilities join them voluntarily, and once inside, they hand over control of transmission planning and the queue that determines when new power plants can plug in. AEP saying out loud that it may leave two of them is unusual. Utilities have migrated between RTOs before, but a large incumbent threatening to step outside organized markets entirely is a governance event, not a routine filing.
The stated grievance is generation interconnection: the multi-year engineering and cost-allocation process every new power plant must clear before it can energize. Queues across the country have lengthened as developers filed far more projects than the grid can absorb, and as demand forecasts — driven heavily by data centers and industrial electrification — moved faster than the studies designed to serve them. For a utility trying to build or contract generation to match load growth in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia and Oklahoma, the queue is the bottleneck between a signed customer and a served customer.
What matters for buyers of digital infrastructure is not whether AEP ultimately leaves. It is that a utility of this size considers the market structure itself a liability worth reopening. Data centers are sited on ten- to twenty-year horizons; the assumption that the rules governing power supply are stable for that period is now a live question in a meaningful part of the eastern grid.
Two Markets, One Complaint — and What That Implies
The most analytically interesting feature of the report is that AEP names both PJM and SPP. These are very different institutions. PJM coordinates a largely restructured, competitive footprint across the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest, where merchant generators compete and a capacity market pays for future reliability. SPP spans mostly vertically integrated territory in the Plains and South, where utilities still own their generation and recover costs through state rate cases. If the same utility finds the interconnection process unworkable in both, the diagnosis pointing only at PJM’s design is incomplete.
That cuts in two directions, and both deserve equal scrutiny. It strengthens the argument that queue processing is a systemic failure of the current model rather than one operator’s mismanagement — a fair reading. It also weakens the implicit premise that leaving would solve the problem, because a utility outside an RTO still runs an interconnection process under federal rules, still needs system impact and facilities studies, and still faces the same constrained supply of turbines, transformers, high-voltage breakers and skilled labor that is throttling projects industry-wide. Neither AEP nor the RTOs have, in the material available, shown how much of the delay is queue administration versus physical supply chain. That distinction is the whole argument, and it is unresolved.
What Leaving an RTO Actually Requires
Exit is not a decision a utility makes alone. Withdrawal from an RTO typically requires approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, compliance with notice provisions in the RTO’s governing agreements, and in practice the acquiescence of state regulators in every state where the utility operates — states that have their own views on reliability, rates and whether their consumers benefit from a larger market. FERC has historically been attentive to whether a departure strands costs on the members left behind, and obligations for transmission projects already approved under regional plans generally do not evaporate on the way out.
Then there is the operational bill. An RTO provides centralized dispatch, reserve sharing across a wide area, and a resource adequacy framework. A departing utility must replicate those functions or buy them, either by running its own balancing authority or joining another market. It also inherits seams — the friction at the borders between neighboring grids, where power that used to flow on a single set of rules now needs contracts, scheduling and duplicated reserves. Seams cost real money and, historically, are the argument that built RTOs in the first place. Precedent from past migrations, such as the moves of several Midwestern utilities from MISO into PJM last decade, suggests a timeline measured in years, not quarters.
None of that makes the threat empty. A large transmission owner signalling that the exit math is being run changes the bargaining table inside RTO stakeholder processes, where votes are weighted and reform packages are negotiated among generators, load-serving entities, states and consumer advocates. Observers are entitled to ask whether this is leverage, intent, or both — and to note that leverage is a legitimate governance tool, not a scandal. The honest answer is that the available reporting does not distinguish between them.
The Data Center Angle Is Real but Frequently Misstated
Two clarifications matter here. First, the process AEP is reportedly complaining about is generation interconnection — plugging power plants in — which is a separate queue from large load interconnection, the process a hyperscale campus goes through to plug demand in. Developers care about both, because a load request is only as good as the supply behind it, but they are governed by different rules and different disputes.
Second, the geography deserves precision. Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley sits in Dominion Energy’s service territory, not AEP’s, so an AEP withdrawal would not remove Loudoun County from PJM. What it would do is shrink the footprint across which PJM plans transmission, shares reserves and allocates costs — and a smaller pool changes the arithmetic for everyone still inside, including the utilities serving the Alley. AEP’s own data center exposure is concentrated elsewhere: central Ohio, which has attracted substantial hyperscale and semiconductor investment, plus growing interest across Appalachian Power’s Virginia and West Virginia footprint and Indiana Michigan Power’s territory.
For site selection, the practical effect is a new diligence line item. A campus reaching commercial operation in 2030 or later, in AEP territory, may be energized under a market structure, capacity obligation and cost-allocation regime different from the one modelled at underwriting. That is not a reason to avoid the region; central Ohio’s fundamentals — land, fiber, water, workforce, existing anchor tenants — are unchanged. It is a reason to price structural risk explicitly rather than assume it away.
Winners, Losers and the Claims That Remain Unproven
If AEP stayed and secured faster queue treatment, the winners would be its own generation plans and the customers waiting on them, and the loser would be the principle that all developers queue on equal terms — a principle merchant generators and independent power producers defend precisely because it protects them from incumbent preference. If AEP left, it would gain control over the sequencing of its own build-out and lose the reserve-sharing and market-depth benefits of a wide area. Consumers could plausibly land on either side depending on whether seams costs exceed the value of faster capacity additions. Anyone claiming certainty about that outcome, in either direction, is ahead of the evidence.
The RTOs have a defensible record to point to. Both operate under FERC Order 2023, which replaced serial, project-by-project studies with cluster analysis and first-ready, first-served rules, and PJM has stood up expedited pathways for shovel-ready projects. It is reasonable for PJM and SPP to argue that reforms adopted only recently have not had time to show results. It is equally reasonable for a utility facing near-term load commitments to say that a reform which pays off in 2029 does not help a customer energizing in 2027. Both claims can be true; neither is proven by assertion.
The fair-minded conclusion is narrow. This is a credible signal of strain in RTO governance from a participant with standing to know, reported at a level of detail too thin to adjudicate. It should raise the priority of queue reform on every regulator’s docket. It should not, on this evidence, be read as a verdict that PJM or SPP have failed, nor as a commitment by AEP to go anywhere.
Background
American Electric Power is one of the largest electric utility holding companies in the United States, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, operating regulated utilities across a footprint that stretches from Michigan and Ohio through Appalachia into Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. That geography is unusual: it straddles three separate wholesale market structures — PJM in the east, SPP in the west, and ERCOT in Texas — which gives the company direct comparative experience of how different market designs handle new generation.
PJM and SPP both emerged from the federal push in the late 1990s and 2000s to separate grid operation from utility ownership and create competitive wholesale markets. The bargain was that utilities would cede control of transmission planning and dispatch in exchange for a larger, more efficient pool. That bargain has come under strain since 2023 as electricity demand began growing again after two decades of flat consumption, driven substantially by data centers, and as interconnection queues filled with more projects than could be studied or built. The result is a widening gap between how quickly load can be signed and how quickly supply can be connected — the gap at the centre of AEP’s reported complaint.
Source: AEP eyes exit from PJM, SPP over slow generation interconnection — Utility Dive, 6 May 2026, reporting that American Electric Power is weighing withdrawal from two major wholesale markets over interconnection delays.