What is PJM?

PJM projects a 25% demand increase over the next four years, against a historical baseline of near-zero annual growth.

“We are seeing and expecting demand to increase over the next four years. So, think about that. 25% more demand in just four years where typically our industry has seen either zero, maybe half a percent growth over year over year.”

PJM customers paid $32 billion for capacity over the past two years but net received 1.2 GW less power in total.

“In the past 2 years in PJM, customers have paid $32 billion for this capacity pricing, and they've gotten 1.2 GW of less power total.”

Calvin Butler on the failure of deregulated markets to incentivize new generation builds in PJM.

“The only states in PJM that have seen any build are those vertically integrated where the utilities are doing it.”

In PJM, $4.3 billion in transmission projects tied to data center load were approved in 2024, with another $2.5 billion under consideration.

“In the PJM interconnection place that we've mentioned before, an estimated $4.3 billion in transmission projects were approved in 2024 that were associated with data center load and then another 2.5 billion under consideration.”

New natural gas capacity cannot be delivered into PJM until 2031 or 2032, leaving a multi-year flexibility gap that distributed energy resources could fill.

“The natural gas industry has a huge problem. They cannot deliver gigawatts until 2031, 2032 into PJM.”

PJM is deploying an Ag Tech AI solution to automatically screen interconnection applications within 10 days, replacing weeks of manual engineer review.

“In this next cycle that's coming up in just 10 days, PJM will be using an Ag Tech AI solution which will allow them to automatically look at everything in that application without an engineer spending weeks and weeks evaluating that.”

PJM's load forecasting is simply an aggregation of member utility forecasts, meaning distributed energy resources that utilities do not track are systematically invisible to grid operators.

“The way PJM does load forecasting is just an aggregation of the individual utility forecast.”

Power prices in the PJM grid network have increased 10x over the last 24 months.

“Power prices have gone up 10x in the last 24 months.”

In a PJM capacity auction, utilities needed 7 to 8 gigawatts of new energy supply but only 156 megawatts materialized.

“They needed like seven or eight gawatt. They had 156 megawatts or something show up.”

A fivefold increase in PJM capacity prices translates to only roughly a 10% increase in a typical household electricity bill, illustrating how capacity is a small share of total costs.

“Could be the case that your the capacity prices increased by a factor of five and your electricity bill has maybe only increased by 10%.”