On October 2, 2026, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator asked federal regulators for permission to answer the hardest question in grid interconnection a lot faster — for a narrow class of customers willing to pay a steep price in commitment. MISO’s filing at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposes a new 120-day Large Load Addition Resource Study, known as LARS, that would study a very large new load and the new generation meant to supply it in a single, parallel process, rather than in the separate study tracks that load and generation travel today.
The proposal is aimed squarely at the data centers and large industrial facilities driving MISO’s load forecasts, and it arrives as a direct response to a FERC order that found the grid operator’s existing large-load rules inadequate.
What LARS would do
Today, a large load seeking transmission service and a generator seeking interconnection go through separate study processes with separate assumptions, separate timelines, and separate upgrade assignments — even when the two are plainly connected, with the generator planned specifically to serve the load. MISO’s proposal collapses that duplication: the load and the generation would be studied in parallel, under aligned assumptions, with both studies concluding at roughly the same time, within 120 days.
When the load and the generation are modeled together, the network upgrades identified can be optimized for the pair — the injection and the withdrawal offsetting each other in ways that neither study alone would capture — rather than sized for each in isolation. MISO was explicit that the cheapest answer for either party alone is not the objective; the goal is the solution that best fits both needs together, at the lowest combined cost. LARS is not a general-purpose speedup of interconnection. It is a targeted tool for one configuration: big load, nearby new generation, studied as a unit.
Who qualifies, and under what conditions
The eligibility bar is high, and the conditions are the substance of the proposal. LARS would be open to loads larger than 200 megawatts paired with new generation located in the same local resource zone — one of the 10 zones across MISO’s footprint that generally align with state boundaries. MISO would study up to 10 applications in each of three annual study periods, a hard cap that keeps the fast track narrow by design.
Timing conditions bind the pair together from the start: the generating facility’s commercial operation date and the large load’s in-service date must both fall within three years of the LARS application. The load may begin taking service in phases, but it must take the full amount of transmission service it requested by the time the generator begins operating, and under certain conditions a load may be served by multiple generating facilities.
Applicants would also face non-refundable deposits designed to filter out speculative projects, though the reporting on the filing does not specify the deposit amounts. The deposits, the three-year clock, and the pairing requirement all do the same work — making sure a project that asks for the fast track is real and committed.
The 15-year lock is the price of speed
It is worth pausing on the proposal’s defining condition: the generation and the load must remain paired for at least 15 years. That quietly converts a connection request into a long-term commercial commitment. A hyperscaler that wants a 120-day answer can get one — but only by tying a specific generating plant to a specific load site for a decade and a half, longer than many data center leases and far longer than the planning horizon on which most load requests are made. The generation cannot wander off to sell into the market; the load cannot swap in cheaper supply a few years later. The pair is a pair.
That is a real trade, and it is a more honest one than the alternative now visible elsewhere in the industry: connection requests filed speculatively, at multiple sites, with no intention of building at most of them, clogging study resources and inflating load forecasts. MISO’s design forces the applicant to decide, upfront, whether it is serious — and to put money and a 15-year commitment behind the answer.
Why MISO is doing this now
The proposal did not arrive unprompted. On June 18, 2026, FERC issued a show-cause order against MISO under section 206 of the Federal Power Act, docket EL26-70-000, reported at 195 FERC paragraph 61,212. The order was one of six tailored orders FERC issued that day to each of the regional grid operators under its jurisdiction, each preliminarily finding that the operator’s existing tariff appears unjust and unreasonable because it does not account for the way data centers and other large loads connect to and use the transmission system. Each operator was given 60 days to justify the status quo or file tariff revisions.
FERC’s orders converged on five categories of reform: clearer and faster transmission service application and study processes; protections against cost shifting, paired with new transparency into transmission costs; rules for co-location and behind-the-meter generation; new transmission services for flexible loads; and a study path for generation sited electrically close to the loads it serves. LARS is MISO’s answer to that last category.
The pressure behind the filing
The underlying pressure is load growth. MISO told FERC it expects load across its footprint to grow by 1 to 3 percent a year through 2044, driven by data centers and manufacturing facilities — the same pattern straining every U.S. grid operator. MISO operates the grid and wholesale power markets across 15 states, from Louisiana to Minnesota. The queue problem this publication has covered for generation now has a load-side twin: too many large requests, too little study capacity, and no reliable way to tell the real projects from the speculative ones.
LARS is not MISO’s first response to the show-cause order. In an August 28 filing, MISO proposed tariff revisions addressing visibility, ramp-rate, and disturbance ride-through requirements for large loads, along with transition provisions meant to minimize disruption to existing commercial arrangements — and asked that those revisions take effect December 4, 2026. That filing defined a “large load” as 50 megawatts or more at a single substation, with a “computational load” carve-out at 25 megawatts of IT-equipment demand — so the 200-megawatt LARS threshold is reserved for the very largest projects.
What LARS would not touch
Two limits in the proposal deserve emphasis, because they define what the fast track is not. First, LARS would not affect generating projects already sitting in MISO’s standard generation interconnection queue. The standard queue — the cluster-study process that FERC’s Order 2023 reforms reshaped, and that this publication’s interconnection explainer covered in depth — keeps running on its own track. LARS is a parallel door for a specific kind of project, not a reordering of the existing line.
Second, MISO says the proposed load and generation would be held to the same study standards as its other interconnection processes. The 120-day clock compresses the schedule; it does not lower the bar. That distinction will matter in the FERC proceeding, because the most obvious objection to any fast track is that speed comes at the expense of rigor. MISO’s answer, in advance, is that the standards are unchanged and only the process is parallel.
How this differs from the queue problem
Readers of the interconnection explainer will recognize the deeper logic. The generation queue’s central pathology was serial study: projects studied one at a time, each building on the last, so that every withdrawal cascaded restudies through the line behind it. Cluster studies fixed part of that by studying groups together. LARS applies the same insight to a different seam — the seam between load studies and generation studies. Studying the pair together avoids the absurdity of two separate processes reaching inconsistent conclusions about the same wires.
There is a second parallel to the queue story: the speculation filter. The generation queue’s history is a lesson in what happens when queue positions are cheap — speculative projects flood in, real projects wait behind them, and completion rates collapse into the teens. The deposits, the three-year deadline, and above all the 15-year pairing are MISO’s attempt to avoid repeating that history on the load side.
The PJM contrast
The contrast with PJM, the grid operator to MISO’s east, sharpens what is distinctive about MISO’s approach. PJM’s answer to the same large-load pressure has been central procurement: a one-time Reliability Backstop Procurement aimed at acquiring roughly 6.8 gigawatts of new capacity to close a shortfall in its capacity auction for the 2028/29 delivery year, a shortfall driven largely by data center demand forecasts. On September 29, 2026, FERC accepted PJM’s proposal but suspended it for five months, setting a paper hearing on cost allocation, transmission-owner exit provisions, and load-serving-entity collateral requirements — and encouraged PJM to file a revised proposal instead. PJM has said it intends to file a revised plan by October 29.
The two approaches could hardly be more different. PJM proposes that the grid operator procure the supply, with the cost-allocation fight — who pays for capacity that serves new loads — at the center of the proceeding. MISO proposes that the load bring its own supply, studied jointly, with the pairing requirement doing the work that PJM’s cost-allocation rules would have to do. One centralizes; the other bilateralizes. FERC is now, in effect, running both experiments at once.
What it means for data centers shopping for speed
For the hyperscalers and developers scanning the Midwest for speed to power, LARS reframes the shopping question. The relevant metric is no longer just which site has the fastest interconnection queue — it is which site can support a genuine load-generation pair, with a plant that can be built and paired within three years and held in the pairing for fifteen.
The same-local-resource-zone requirement adds a geographic discipline: the generation cannot be a paper pairing with a distant plant in another state. It has to be in the same zone, which generally means the same state. States in MISO’s footprint that want to attract data center investment now have a reason to think about generation and load together — to ask not just whether they have transmission headroom, but whether they have generation projects that can pair with incoming loads on LARS’s terms.
What it means for everyone else on the system
For existing customers, the question is the one FERC’s show-cause order put at the center: cost shifting. When a massive new load connects, the upgrades it triggers — substations, reinforcements, new lines — can end up in the rate base paid by everyone, even when the new load is the reason they were built. LARS’s design pushes against that in two ways. The joint study is supposed to produce a more efficient upgrade set, sized for the pair rather than the load alone. And the pairing requirement gives the system a durable resource to set against the durable demand — rather than a load that arrives, takes its upgrades, and leaves the system holding the cost.
That is the theory. Whether it holds in practice depends on details FERC and stakeholders will probe: how upgrade costs are allocated when the pair’s joint study identifies them, how the pairing is enforced over 15 years of changing ownership and market conditions, and what happens if the generation retires early or the load fails to materialize on schedule. A 15-year commitment is only as strong as its enforcement mechanism, and the filing’s reporting leaves the enforcement details unclear.
What happens next
MISO asked FERC to issue a decision by December 2, 2026, so the grid operator could open the first study period early next year. That is an aggressive ask — two months from filing to order. The December 2 date is a request, not a deadline FERC is bound to meet, and the commission’s handling of PJM’s proposal — accept, suspend, hear, revise — is a reminder that FERC does not always move on the applicant’s schedule.
There is also the matter of what a 120-day study actually delivers. A study is not a connection, and a connection is not a completed project. The upgrades LARS identifies still have to be built — by transmission owners, on construction timelines measured in years, against the same workforce and supply-chain constraints that bind every other grid project. LARS compresses the study phase; it does nothing to compress the steel-and-concrete phase. What it actually buys is certainty, early — a firm answer about what it will take to connect, delivered fast enough to plan around.
The bottom line
That certainty is no small thing. In a queue system where the defining experience is years of silence followed by a surprise upgrade bill, a 120-day answer with a known price is a genuine improvement — even with a 15-year string attached. The question FERC now faces is whether the string is the right length, the filter is the right tightness, and the fast track serves the system as well as it serves the applicants who use it.