With the age of hyperscalers ramping up, Meta is the latest major tech firm to ask FERC for market-based rate authority as it sets up its own internal power marketer: Atem Energy (ER25-3440).
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is one of many firms developing artificial intelligence applications that have been a major contributor to the resumption of overall power growth after a couple of decades of stagnation.
Atem Energy is a Delaware-based company that has been formed to act as a power marketer to sell energy, capacity and certain ancillary services at wholesale in the United States. The firm’s MBR application does not specify where it will market power.
Meta is not the first big tech firm to seek MBR authorization: Alphabet’s Google has had it since 2010 (ER10-2835), Amazon since 2015 (ER15-1905) and Microsoft since 2021 (ER21-964). Companies in other sectors have been at it even longer, notably Walmart, which set up its in-house power marketer, Texas Retail Energy, in 2002.
A major company setting up its own power marketer to secure power supplies comes with some benefits, but significant costs as well, Electric Advisors Consulting’s Frank Lacey said in an email.
“In the plus column, you can design an electricity product tailor-made to your needs, including renewable attributes, risk management strategies, billing allocations and other,” Lacey said. “You can also avoid the profit margins built into other suppliers’ products.
“On the flip side of that coin, you have to build out an energy team, presumably with some trading and risk management expertise,” he said. “You have to be registered with FERC to sell electricity at market-based rates. You need to be a member of each RTO you have facilities in and bear those costs, including credit requirements.”
If Meta wants to become a state-regulated retailer to supply its facilities, it needs to register with their regulatory commissions and set up data exchanges with the relevant utilities, he added.
“You have to bear the risk of your own energy hedges and non-hedged positions, and as an RTO market participant, you own a share of the marketwide risk should any market participants go bankrupt,” Lacey said. “If the company has the resources to do all of this, it might make sense. On the other hand, I would think a company like Meta would have enough horsepower to attract a lot of attention from the existing suppliers in the market.”
Neither Atem nor its upstream ownership at Meta own any facilities that are for the generation, transmission or distribution of electric power. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg owns more than 10% of its shares, which triggers additional requirements, but he does not “directly or indirectly own or control a 10% or greater voting interest” in any generator or other energy assets in the United States, the application said.
The lack of existing assets in the power markets means Atem lacks horizontal or vertical market power, which satisfies the requirements for FERC to grant MBR authority, the application said.
The application seeks authority to sell ancillary services at market rates in CAISO, ISO-NE, MISO, NYISO, PJM and SPP. Atem asked for an effective date of Nov. 16, 2025, for its MBR authority.
