Murray believes state regulators haven’t been diligent enough in pressuring utilities to follow through with data-sharing requirements. “The buck stops with the state,” he said.
To be fair, utilities need to be careful with how they share this data, since they’re legally responsible for protecting customer privacy and data security.
But Murray believes that utilities are using customer data privacy as an excuse to protect their own monopoly power. Utilities, including many in PJM’s territory, have launched their own demand-response programs and time-of-use rates that allow customers to save money by reducing their electric consumption during times of peak demand. That means they “participate as direct competitors to competitive aggregators,” Voltus and Mission:data noted in their FERC complaint.
In a December report, Mission:data and the Open Markets Institute, a nonprofit that advocates against business monopolies, argued that utilities “are now using meter data as a competitive weapon” to protect their monopoly relationship with their customers.
This view has been echoed by the R Street Institute, a free market–oriented think tank. In a November blog post, Chris Villarreal, R Street associate fellow, wrote that access to smart meter data “empowers customers and is vital to the development of new markets. Yet in state after state, the lack of data access rules or policies proved a key impediment to meaningful customer choice.”
Utilities say they’re following state laws and regulations
The utilities responding to the Voltus and Mission:data complaint don’t see it that way.
Instead, in comments filed with FERC, New Jersey’s Public Service Electric and Gas (PSE&G), Pennsylvania’s Duquesne Light, and Exelon, which owns utilities such as ComEd in Illinois, PECO in Pennsylvania, and Baltimore Gas & Electric, Delmarva and Pepco in the mid-Atlantic region, explained that they’re simply following state laws and regulations.
Exelon told FERC that Voltus and Mission:data should address their concerns instead to “the state commissions that regulate data access.” PSE&G stated that it “has no authorization to establish or operate large-scale automated interval data-sharing systems that would release customer interval data to entities even with individual customer consent.” And Duquesne Light stated that it “can only release customer interval meter data as prescribed by Pennsylvania state law.”
This isn’t the first time FERC has been asked to resolve this dispute between state-regulated utilities and the federal regulations that govern PJM. Back in 2024, FERC rejected a similar complaint from demand-response provider CPower, citing both a lack of evidence that utilities were withholding data and FERC’s lack of jurisdiction to order state-regulated utilities to change their data-sharing rules.
Murray said the new Voltus complaint provides far more detailed evidence than the CPower complaint did.
But he conceded that the proposed remedy available to FERC — ordering PJM to let Voltus and other demand-response companies use statistical sampling methods for customers that have smart meters — doesn’t address the fundamental issues.
PJM opposes the sampling solution, stating in its response to the FERC complaint that this would lead to a “degradation of the quality of information PJM receives.”
Voltus is also pushing state regulators to order utilities to give demand-response aggregators access to data from the electronic data interchange (EDI) platforms that exist to allow other retail electricity providers to compete to serve utility customers in Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states, she said.
To date, only one utility in Pennsylvania has allowed Voltus to access this data, Orvis said. Many others expressly prohibit Voltus and other third-party demand-response and virtual power plant companies from doing so.
Ideally, Orvis would like to see more states adopt statewide smart meter data-sharing platforms like Smart Meter Texas, which was put in place nearly two decades ago to enable data sharing between utilities and third-party companies in the state’s competitive energy market.
“Texas has said that customers have paid for advanced metering infrastructure. And because they’ve paid for it, they own the data; utilities don’t,” she said. “The diverse array of retailers in Texas are users of that data, and third-party aggregators like Voltus can also use that. And it’s designed for computer readability — nobody is emailing.”
Whether states will act quickly on smart meter data-sharing reforms is another matter. Murray noted that the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission last year issued an order to explore how to make EDI data available to third-party companies. But the regulators have assigned that task to a working group that denied similar requests in 2015, he said.
New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities has also proposed smart meter data-access standards that could expand access, which PSE&G in its FERC comment noted could “provide guidance for consistent and secure sharing” of data. But Murray noted that rulemaking has been underway since 2022 with little progress to show for it.
PJM states including Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia have passed laws and instituted regulations promoting virtual power plants. But companies looking to make that vision a reality will run into serious obstacles unless smart meter data is accessible, Orvis said.
This shouldn’t be framed “as a battle” between utilities and third-party companies, Orvis emphasized. “There’s plenty of untapped potential there.”
