By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews | Part of The New Land Wars series
Charlotte Hetterick runs an organic farm in Carroll County. Under the current route for the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project, the fields she certified as pesticide-free for years would sit beneath transmission towers sprayed with herbicide to keep the right-of-way clear. Her farm isn’t an outlier. It’s one of hundreds caught in the path of a 70-mile, 500,000-volt line that Maryland’s Public Service Commission has not yet approved, and won’t rule on until sometime after February 2027 at the earliest.
A federal appeals court just handed PSEG your land anyway, and admitted in writing that the deadline it used to justify the whole thing probably isn’t real.
MDBayNews has been telling this story since last spring, from Kevin Daniels standing in front of surveyors on his Frederick County farmland to Wes Moore’s non-answers about a project his own administration has watched steamroll rural Maryland. The latest chapter isn’t a state hearing or a county resolution. It’s a federal appellate court telling landowners, in writing, that they lose, while all but conceding the emergency behind it doesn’t hold up.
Here’s what that ruling actually means, in plain numbers:
- 117 landowners appealed. All of them lost.
- $2,000 is what one Carroll County resident was just fined for refusing surveyors entry, before any state approval exists.
- 400+ properties sit in the project’s path across three counties.
- $345 is the estimated per-household hit to Maryland electric bills over the next decade under the cost formula OPC is now fighting at FERC.
- 0 is the number of times the PSC has actually approved this project. Zero. It still hasn’t happened.
“0 is the number of times the PSC has actually approved this project. Zero. It still hasn’t happened.”
The ruling: a green light with an asterisk
PSEG filed its application for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity, the state permission slip it actually needs to build anything, on December 31, 2024. Nearly two years later, that application still hasn’t been approved. Under the schedule the PSC has adopted, it won’t be decided before early 2027 at the soonest.
None of that has stopped PSEG from getting what it wanted most: access to the land itself.
In April 2025, PSEG asked a federal court to force its way onto properties whose owners had refused survey crews. A district judge granted it that June. A second lawsuit that summer went after roughly 200 more properties. By August, PSEG was asking the same court to send U.S. Marshals along with its crews, citing threats at a Carroll County property, including a man on an ATV who allegedly drove at private security and a landowner who released dogs on approaching surveyors. One property owner told PSEG flatly that he wouldn’t allow access unless federal marshals did the surveying themselves.
The judge said no to the broad Marshals request that September. He later let marshals accompany crews onto a handful of properties where resistance continued. And in July of this year, he held one Carroll County resident in contempt of court, fining her $2,000 after she kept obstructing surveyors and skipped her own hearing. Whatever you think of that particular fight, it shows how far this has gone: Maryland residents are now being fined by a federal court for refusing entry to a company that still doesn’t have state approval to build anything.
“Maryland residents are now being fined by a federal court for refusing entry to a company that still doesn’t have state approval to build anything.”
A group of 117 landowners appealed the underlying access ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing PSEG had no business acting like it held eminent domain power before it actually held a CPCN. On August 6, 2026, a three-judge panel shut that argument down. Writing for the court, Judge Nicole G. Berner said PSEG needs “a viable path” to its state certificate, and that survey access is a necessary step on that path. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III joined her. Judge Julius N. Richardson agreed on narrower state-law grounds. It was a clean sweep for PSEG.
Here’s the part that should stop you cold. The entire justification for rushing landowners into court, for the Marshals’ request, for the contempt fine, has been PJM’s June 2027 in-service deadline, the date after which the grid operator claims Maryland risks blackouts and “voltage collapse conditions.” The 4th Circuit panel itself acknowledged in its ruling that hitting that deadline is unlikely. It let the survey access stand anyway, reasoning that an extended deadline could still plausibly be met.
Read that again. A federal appeals court just forced Maryland landowners to submit to a private company’s surveyors, over threats of contempt, U.S. Marshals, and now actual fines, in the name of a deadline the court itself doubts will be hit.
“A federal appeals court just forced Maryland landowners to submit to a private company’s surveyors in the name of a deadline the court itself doubts will be hit.”
Local officials on both sides of the aisle have said the quiet part out loud for over a year now. Baltimore County’s Council voted unanimously to formally oppose the project. Carroll County’s Board of Commissioners cited “protecting property owner rights, local control, land use, and permitting authority” in its opposition, then went further and filed a court brief backing the landowners directly. And in a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Republican Rep. Andy Harris jointly pressed PSEG back in 2024 to take community input seriously before ever filing with the PSC. When Chris Van Hollen and Andy Harris agree on something, it’s worth paying attention to.
The $345 question: who actually pays for this
The land fight is the sharpest edge of this story, but it’s not the only one. A slower-moving fight at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission answers a different question: even if this thing gets built, who’s stuck with the bill.
Maryland’s Office of the People’s Counsel filed a complaint at FERC in May challenging how PJM spreads transmission costs across its territory. The office found that of roughly $22 billion in PJM-approved transmission projects over a recent three-year window, one of which is MPRP, Maryland ratepayers are on the hook for about $2 billion in capital costs. OPC’s own projection: roughly $1.6 billion added to Maryland electric bills over the next decade, with the residential share alone estimated near $345 per household.
- Eighty Maryland state lawmakers wrote FERC in June backing the complaint, and asked that the $2 billion already assigned be refunded, not just fixed going forward.
- Maryland’s full congressional delegation sent its own letter of support.
- PJM’s own Independent Market Monitor, not exactly a mouthpiece for state advocates, filed comments in July calling the current cost formula “demonstrably no longer appropriate” for the data center era.
- Transmission owners and the Data Center Coalition are fighting the complaint. FERC hasn’t ruled.
Strip away the acronyms, and the argument is simple. Maryland’s own electricity demand is growing modestly. The demand driving projects like MPRP is concentrated in Virginia, whose tax incentives built the densest data center market in the country. Under PJM’s rules, the cost of feeding that growth gets spread across the whole region, which means Maryland families can end up footing the bill for infrastructure that primarily benefits somebody else’s economic development strategy.
“Maryland families can end up footing the bill for infrastructure that primarily benefits somebody else’s economic development strategy.”
The White House even got a version of this admission on the record in March, when major data center developers signed a voluntary “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” agreeing to cover their own network upgrade costs. It reads nicely. It isn’t enforceable, and it hasn’t moved the numbers showing up in PJM’s cost allocation math for Maryland customers.
The deadline that was never real
The 4th Circuit’s own words aren’t the only sign this urgency was manufactured. On May 22, 2026, PSEG filed a revised schedule with the PSC asking to push the case’s target final order date from February 2027 to July 30, 2027. A company spokesperson told reporters construction would then take another 15 to 18 months, putting real-world completion closer to late 2028, more than a year past the June 2027 date PJM has cited over and over as the point of no return. The Commission hasn’t ruled on that request. The officially adopted schedule, with final briefs due mid-February 2027, is still what’s on the books.
Meanwhile, as of PPRP’s April 2026 filing, the environmental field surveys that started this whole fight, the same ones landowners took all the way to the 4th Circuit to resist, were still substantially unfinished: about 24% of archaeological surveys done, and roughly a third of the rare-species habitat assessments.
So ask yourself the obvious question. If PSEG itself doesn’t expect to finish this project before the blackout deadline it used to justify hauling Maryland families into federal court, what exactly was the emergency?
“If PSEG itself doesn’t expect to finish this project before the blackout deadline it used to justify hauling Maryland families into federal court, what exactly was the emergency?”
What’s next
- PSEG filed seven more proposed route adjustments on August 5, shifting the right-of-way in a handful of spots, including away from a planned truffle farm expansion near Westminster and New Windsor. The route still isn’t final even though survey access now is.
- Stop MPRP hasn’t said whether it will seek a full 4th Circuit rehearing or take this to the U.S. Supreme Court. Its president says options are being “carefully” reviewed with counsel.
- Public hearings hit each affected county the weeks of Sept. 21 and Sept. 28, giving residents one more shot to get on the record before the PSC.
- Evidentiary hearings run Dec. 8 through Dec. 18, with final briefs due Feb. 12, 2027, unless the Commission grants PSEG’s request to push that further.
- FERC still hasn’t ruled on the OPC cost complaint, a decision that could hit Maryland households’ bills regardless of what happens with the route.
MDBayNews will keep tracking both fights as they develop. This is the New Land Wars now. It didn’t end with a court ruling, and it isn’t over.
Sources: This report draws on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ August 6, 2026 opinion in the PSEG land-survey appeal and related reporting from Maryland Matters and WYPR; U.S. District Court for Maryland filings and orders in PSEG’s land-survey litigation; Maryland Public Service Commission Case No. 9773 procedural filings and scheduling orders; the Maryland Office of the People’s Counsel’s May 2026 FERC complaint (Docket EL26-63) and related Synapse Energy Economics analysis; PJM Interconnection and PSEG’s own public project materials; Maryland Power Plant Research Program filings on environmental survey completion; reporting from CBS News Baltimore, The Baltimore Banner, the Baltimore Sun, and Fox45/WBFF on the project’s local opposition, route revisions, and court proceedings; and public statements from Baltimore County Council, the Carroll County Board of Commissioners, and the offices of Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Andy Harris.
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