PJM Utilities Spent $6 Billion on Smart Meters. Customers Still Cannot Reach the Interval Data

Utilities across PJM Interconnection have spent close to $6 billion installing roughly 12 million smart meters at homes and businesses. The 15-minute interval data those meters record is the raw material for managing a demand charge: it shows a building when its peak demand lands, how high it runs, and what a battery or a load shift would have to do to bring it down.

Across PJM’s 13 states, that data is largely unreachable to the customers being metered.

That is the central allegation of a complaint filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in October 2025 by the demand-response company Voltus and the Mission:data Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for customer data access. The filing argues that utilities controlling the meters refuse to release the data in any usable form, and that the refusal blocks customers from the third-party programs that pay them to cut consumption when the grid is strained.

The friction. The complaint describes access regimes built to fail. Some utilities required Voltus to submit data requests in batches of ten customers at a time. Others made customers send individual email requests and then wait two to four weeks to download the file. Some declined to release key meter data even after customers had given explicit permission.

Voltus pointed to Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, a utility that has adopted Green Button Connect, the technical standard meant to make data portable. Of roughly 20,000 customers Voltus tried to enroll, about 4 percent made it through the utility’s system. The lost enrollments, said Emily Orvis, Voltus’s vice president of energy markets, amounted to about 23 megawatts of capacity. Across PJM she put the figure higher: “We think there are gigawatts of capacity that are stranded because of this data-access issue.”

The sampling rule. Providers do not hit the same wall with the older electromechanical meters that smart meters replaced. PJM lets aggregators use statistical sampling to estimate the load reductions of customers who lack interval meters. Its rules assume that where a smart meter exists, the data behind it can be reached. In practice it often cannot. A $6 billion modernization program made market participation harder than the analog equipment it displaced.

The defense. The utilities named in the proceeding do not dispute that the data is hard to get. They argue the constraint is not theirs to lift. PSE&G in New Jersey, Duquesne Light in Pennsylvania, and Exelon, which owns ComEd, PECO, and Baltimore Gas and Electric, told FERC they are following state law. PSE&G said it “has no authorization to establish or operate large-scale automated interval data-sharing systems.” Exelon said the complainants should take their case to “the state commissions that regulate data access.”

The conflict. Many PJM utilities run their own demand-response programs and time-of-use rates. The entity that holds the interval data therefore also sells a product that competes with the aggregators requesting it. That alignment of roles, custodian of the data and vendor of a competing service, sits at the center of the complaint.

The complaint is framed around demand response. The data dependency it exposes is the same one that governs commercial behind-the-meter storage.

A commercial demand charge is set by a building’s highest 15- or 30-minute demand reading in a billing period, frequently the single largest line on a commercial bill. Sizing a battery to shave that peak, and financing it against the savings, requires the interval record that shows when and how high those peaks run. Without it, a storage proposal rests on tariff-based estimates of a load shape no one has measured. The interval data Voltus needs to bid a demand-response resource is the same data a developer needs to underwrite a peak-shaving system.

That asymmetry sharpens a trend already visible across the region. The utilities at the center of the complaint, PSE&G, the Exelon companies, and Duquesne, are among those raising commercial delivery and demand charges through pending rate cases. A customer’s strongest hedge against a rising demand charge is an accurate model of the demand being charged for, and that model depends on data the utility holds and has little commercial reason to release.

The comparison has a limit worth stating. Voltus told FERC that for the large commercial and industrial accounts that make up most of its portfolio, it installs its own meter-reading hardware and manages the exchange by hand. Large buildings can buy their way around the wall. The customers who cannot are the small and mid-sized commercial accounts, the segment where a single battery can still move a bill and where the cost of private metering is hard to justify. The data barrier falls heaviest where the unit economics are tightest.

The remedy in front of FERC is partial by Mission:data’s own admission. Allowing aggregators to apply statistical sampling to smart-meter customers, as PJM already permits for customers without interval meters, would route around the data wall rather than remove it. The more complete fix sits with the states, which regulate the distribution utilities that hold the meters and set the rates, and which the named utilities themselves identify as the proper venue for data-access rules.

Utilities across PJM spent close to $6 billion deploying the meters. Whether the interval data those meters generate becomes reachable to the customers being metered now sits before FERC and the state commissions that regulate data access.

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