PJM Interconnection is combining its Reliability Backstop Procurement and Connect and Manage plans and moving up its timeline for launching its matchmaking solicitation, according to a May 19 letter to stakeholders.

The PJM Board of Managers told stakeholders in a two-page letter that it has recognized that its separate Critical Issue Fast Path (CIFP) processes for its Reliability Backstop Procurement and its Connect and Manage framework can no longer remain separate. By combining the two CIFPs, the Board seeks to accelerate the PJM central procurement process for data center customers — potentially aiming for September 2026. In the meantime, PJM has also asked its governors to design their own frameworks for data centers to bear the financial responsibility.

PJM is proposing continuing with its current framework for its procurement: allowing “discrete time for bilateral contracting between willing buyers and sellers, while also timely executing a centralized procurement.” PJM has previously promoted a six-month timeline for the bidding and matchmaking process, noting that any resulting contracts are optional and not obligatory.

Meanwhile, the Connect and Manage framework deals with the rules used for data centers that connect to the grid for power without bringing their own new generation.

By speeding up this process, the PJM Board said it allows for greater certainty in the Connect and Manage framework to better support the bilateral transactions, but that “final certainty” may not be available until “sometime in 2027” due to the potential for rehearing requests and a court challenge.

The grid operator said that waiting until 2027 to execute the central procurement process poses a greater risk to reliability.

“Procuring the shortfall resulting from the upcoming Base Residual Auction through a centralized procurement in September 2026 will mitigate the near-term reliability risk while not precluding future bilateral contracting opportunities for additional resources to fulfill new large load demand for future delivery years,” the letter states.

A 70-page report from PJM, Powering Reliability Through Market Design, highlighted the Connect and Manage framework, saying that if new large loads want reliable power, they must build it, bring it, or finance it themselves.

“The core logic is straightforward: Large new loads that seek to interconnect to the system without bringing commensurate new generation capacity are, in a meaningful sense, free riding on the reliability provided by the existing fleet,” the report states. “If the system is short and load must be shed, there is a defensible argument that these loads, which impose incremental demand on a strained system without yet being able to contribute commensurate supply, should be curtailed before legacy load that has been served by and paid into the shared reliability pool.”

The PJM Board letter comes one day after the ISO was granted permission from the US Department of Energy to curtail power from data centers in power demand emergencies.

In a recent two-day annual PJM member meeting in Baltimore, Data Center Coalition President and CEO Josh Levi said on a panel that curtailing power shouldn’t be a solution, as it risks critical infrastructure.

“It’s not good for anybody if there’s mandatory data center curtailment,” Levi said. “Our facilities host medical records, our facilities do traffic light synchronization, our facilities do tens of thousands of credit card transactions every second, 911 systems, national security government agencies … These are very consequential outcomes, and it is important that we all understand we need power.”

While the May 19 letter marks PJM’s first move to combine the two efforts, the idea was proposed during the stakeholder feedback process.

During an April 17 Reliability Backstop Proposal meeting among stakeholders, representatives from Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s office raised concerns about the separate CIFPs, their overlapping nature, and whether separate filings to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would hamper PJM’s sense of urgency to meet power demand for large load customers. At that time, PJM said it had not yet discussed a singular stakeholder process or filing to FERC internally.

PJM noted at the end of its letter to stakeholders that it will issue a new schedule on the combined CIFP soon and repurposed a May 27 committee meeting for stakeholders to discuss the newly combined process.