The organization responsible for keeping the lights on for roughly 67 million Americans is suddenly the subject of breakup talk in Washington. PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization spanning 13 states and the District of Columbia, is facing mounting pressure from federal officials and bipartisan state governors who want structural reforms to address electricity prices that have gone from uncomfortable to genuinely alarming.
The driving force behind this isn’t some obscure regulatory dispute. It’s AI data centers, which are consuming power at a pace that PJM’s existing infrastructure simply wasn’t designed to handle.
The numbers tell a brutal story
Look at PJM’s capacity auction results and the trajectory becomes impossible to ignore. Prices jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day for the 2024/25 delivery year to $329.17 per megawatt-day for 2026/27. That’s not a typo. That’s more than a tenfold increase in the cost of ensuring power plants are available when needed.
In English: capacity auctions are how PJM pays generators to guarantee they’ll show up during peak demand. When those prices spike, the cost flows directly to the people and businesses paying electric bills.
