The Forgotten Middle | Why 5 to 75 MW Sites Wait the Longest for Power
Updated: 7 days ago
Last updated November 2026. This page is updated as the rules and the market move. See What has changed, at the bottom.
The power conversation right now is measured in gigawatts. In October, AEP agreed to buy "up to 1.6 gigawatts (GW) of Mainspring Linear Generators through 2034." Cleanview's tracker found "59 data centers with a combined capacity of ~90 GW" planning to build their own power.
Those deals matter. They show that power you can place near the load is now mainstream. But most of the industrial real estate being built in this country is not a gigawatt campus. It is a cold storage building, a logistics park, a plant expansion, a mid-scale data center. It needs 5 to 50 MW. And that is the part of the market the system was not built to serve first.
We call it the forgotten middle.
Who lives in the middle
A site in the middle is too big for a rooftop array and too small to get its own power plant deal. It looks like:
A cold storage or food distribution campus with refrigeration that never shuts off.
An industrial park where the developer has to show tenants a power date before they sign.
A manufacturing expansion that needs new capacity on a schedule the plant can plan around.
A mid-scale data center serving a region, not a hyperscale cloud.
These sites have the same question the giants have: is the power there, on my schedule, at a cost I can underwrite? They just have fewer people and fewer options for answering it.
Think of it like freight
A full trainload gets its own schedule. A single parcel rides with the mail. The half-truckload waits at the dock for someone to make room. The 5 to 50 MW site is the half-truckload. Big enough that it cannot just ride along. Not big enough to get a train of its own.
Why the middle waits
The new rules are written around the biggest loads. On October 9, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reviewed PJM's proposal for large loads. PJM defines a large load as one that "has a cumulative peak load of 50 [MW] or greater at a single electrical site," and FERC found that definition "just and reasonable." The registry and the large-load rules start at the top of our range and go up from there.
Some of the middle is already living under big-load terms. In Ohio, AEP Ohio's data center tariff applies to "those with loads above 25 MW," which requires them "to pay for at least 85% of their subscribed monthly capacity for up to 12 years, regardless of actual consumption." A 30 MW data center in AEP Ohio territory falls under that tariff, even though it sits in the middle of our range. (Smaller operators get more flexible terms on a sliding scale.)
The big projects bring their own teams. A gigawatt campus has developers, energy advisors, and utility relationships built in. A 20 MW site usually has a development team that is excellent at land, entitlements, and buildings, and has never had to plan a power plant. Nobody owes them an in-house energy team.
Equipment does not care how big you are. Transformers, switchgear, and generation have to be ordered, built, tested, and delivered. A site that starts that work after it commits to the land starts late.
What changes for a site in the middle
Power stops being a line on the utility bill and becomes a development decision, made at the start alongside land, entitlements, and the building itself. The rules are also starting to allow it. Ohio's House Bill 15 "removes barriers for large energy users to self-generate power, either directly or through a third party."
Before you commit to a site, get three answers:
How many megawatts the site has today.
The date the utility will commit to for the rest.
What you can build on site to open on time anyway.
The third answer is where a site in the middle gets its control back.
How we work in the middle
PowerStack Microgrids™ is The Full-Stack Microgrid Company™. We develop and deliver 5 to 50 MW Energy Infrastructure Assets, from feasibility through construction, built for Speed to Power, Stabilized Cost of Power, and Resiliency. One team, no handoffs.
We have built solar, storage, and electrical systems for over a decade. Now we bring them together. We are technology-agnostic and architecture-specific, with standardized reference designs built with leading equipment partners, so a site in the middle does not start from a blank page.
Our approach is the same on every site: find the constraint and remove it. In the middle, the constraint usually shows up long before anyone breaks ground.
Talk to us before you commit to the site. One conversation, before procurement, tells you whether the power is there.
What has changed
November 2026: page published.
October 13, 2026: AEP agreed to buy up to 1.6 GW of Mainspring Linear Generators through 2034. Utilities are buying on-site generation at scale.
October 9, 2026: FERC found PJM's 50 MW large load definition just and reasonable and accepted a registry to track large loads, while rejecting most of PJM's plan for connecting them.
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