The Globe and Mail reports in its Monday edition that looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly hoping to strike deals with power plants to plug in directly, avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else. An Associated Press dispatch to The Globe says it is raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it is fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it. Front and centre is the data centre that Amazon's cloud-computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania. The arrangement between the plant's owners and AWS -- called a "behind the meter" connection -- is the first such to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts, which is about 40 per cent of the plant's capacity, to the data centre. That is enough to power more than a half-million homes, but FERC's rejection was only on a procedural ground.