A 2-million-square-foot “digital infrastructure campus” is planned at the Keystone Trade Center, once owned by U.S. Steel in Falls Township.

An independent monitor has asked federal officials to ensure consumers don’t get stuck with the bill if the electric grid can’t handle power needs of a massive data center planned for Bucks County.

The monitor, Joseph Bowring, filed comments with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last week, asking that a Sept. 23 transmission service agreement between Peco and Amazon Data Services be rejected.

The agreement is regarding the 2 million-square-foot “digital infrastructure campus” Amazon plans for the Keystone Trade Center, an 1,800-acre property once owned by U.S. Steel, according to Falls Township. The data center, meant to handle computing needs of the wildly increasing demand for AI, has been heralded by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the Trump administration.

But Bowring, the independent market monitor for the region’s grid operator PJM, questioned the agreement, which is designed to protect power customers from economic risks associated with the cost of upgrading systems to handle the new load.

In the agreement, Peco sought to ensure, among other things, that consumers don’t get stuck with the bill for grid upgrades if Amazon never builds the data center.

However, Bowring said that the agreement does not “address the key question of whether there is sufficient capacity to serve the identified large new data center load without imposing significant and unacceptable reliability- and capacity-related cost impacts on all PJM customers.”

He’s not alone in concerns about the cost data centers could impose on homeowners and other power customers. Many have already seen utility bills rise rapidly in the past few months.

Montgomery County-based PJM manages the electric grid for all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia. PJM is responsible for maintaining grid reliability, coordinating electric flow, and assessing capacity. It is the largest regional transmission organization in the U.S.

The data center lies in Peco’s service territory within the PJM grid.