Maryland's complaint against PJM over data-center transmission costs is the cleanest political signal in the power story right now.

The Office of People's Counsel says PJM advanced $22B of regional transmission projects over three years and assigned $2B of that capital cost to Maryland customers, adding $1.6B to bills over ten years, even though the load is driven largely by data centers elsewhere in the grid.

The cheap take is anti-data-center resentment. Wrong target. Compute demand is real, valuable, and brutally clarifying. The scandal is socialized infrastructure pricing. When a hyperscale load appears, it should arrive with capital, firm power, interconnection discipline, and a price signal sharp enough to tell the buyer what the grid actually costs.

If the bill is smeared across captive ratepayers, the grid stops being a market interface and becomes a subsidy fog machine. That is how abundance politics gets poisoned.