PowerHouse Hillwood Holding LLC v. Commonwealth Edison Co. (FERC Blocks ComEd's Bid to Cancel $20B Joliet Data Center's Power Agreement)
FERC rejected ComEd's attempt to cancel the transmission agreement behind Hillwood's $20B Joliet data center over a disputed $1 credit filing, leaving the underlying contract fight to a federal judge in Chicago.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on September 22, 2026 rejected Commonwealth Edison Company's notice seeking to cancel the transmission security agreement behind PowerHouse Hillwood Holding LLC's roughly $20 billion, 1.8-gigawatt Joliet Technology Center data center campus, after PowerHouse Hillwood satisfied the agreement's initial credit support term with a $1 letter of credit that ComEd argued was inadequate. FERC declined to rule on the underlying contract dispute itself, leaving it to litigation already pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Why it matters: The fight shows that a credit-support or security-deposit clause in a utility interconnection or transmission agreement -- often treated as secondary to headline capacity and pricing terms -- can itself become the mechanism by which a utility tries to unwind a multibillion-dollar data center project's power supply. CRE lenders, equity partners, and developers financing hyperscale data center campuses should treat ambiguous credit-support timing language in transmission agreements as a first-order diligence item, not boilerplate.
