PJM races for 15 GW

PJM, the company that runs the power market for 13 states and Washington, said on April 10 that it wants to line up about 15 gigawatts of new electricity supply for data centers in a special process running from September 2026 to March 2027. Fifteen gigawatts is roughly the output of about 15 large nuclear reactors or tens of millions of solar panels. (bloomberg.com) PJM is not a utility with its own power plants. It is the traffic controller for the grid across all or parts of states from Illinois to New Jersey, and it says its system serves about 67 million people. (pjm.com) Its problem is simple: new demand is arriving faster than new generation. On January 16, PJM’s board said it would start a “backstop generation procurement process” because the supply-and-demand imbalance was already pushing up wholesale power costs. (pjm.com) The new demand is coming heavily from data centers, which are giant warehouses full of computers that turn electricity into computing power. PJM said in January that the growth rate it now sees is higher than anything it has seen in recent decades. (pjm.com) PJM’s January 2026 forecast says summer peak demand could rise above 241,000 megawatts by 2041, up about 85,000 megawatts from current levels. Its current generating capacity is about 182,000 megawatts, which shows why planners are scrambling years before all that demand fully arrives. (pjm.com) Even after PJM trimmed some near-term forecasts by using stricter screens for proposed data centers, the longer trend barely changed. PJM said the 10-year average annual summer peak growth rate in its 2021 forecast was 0.3%, and the 2026 forecast now puts that rate at 3.6%. (pjm.com) This is not PJM’s first fast-track. In May 2025, it picked 51 projects in a one-time Reliability Resource Initiative that added 11.8 gigawatts of nameplate capacity to an accelerated interconnection review, and 69% of that selected capacity was natural gas. (utilitydive.com) That earlier rush gives a clue about what “fast” means on this grid. PJM said those selected projects could come online about 18 months earlier than under the normal queue, but it still expected about 90% of them to be operating only by 2030. (utilitydive.com) Washington has been pushing the same direction. On January 16, the White House and a bipartisan group of governors asked PJM to consider a one-time emergency auction in which data center owners would sign 15-year power purchase agreements and pay for the new plants built for them whether they used all the electricity or not. (utilitydive.com) PJM’s own board has been trying to make data centers bring more of their own answers. Its January plan included ways for large new loads to pair themselves with new generation and to accept earlier curtailment, which means getting cut back first when the grid is tight. (pjm.com) The fight underneath all this is over who pays and who waits. If data centers get connected before matching supply is ready, households can end up sharing the cost through higher wholesale prices, but if operators force every new campus to arrive with new generation attached, some of the biggest artificial intelligence projects slow down. (pjm.com; utilitydive.com) So the 15-gigawatt push is less a single procurement than a warning flare. The biggest grid in the eastern United States is acting like the data-center buildout is no longer a 2030s problem and is now treating it as a 2026 scheduling problem. (bloomberg.com; pjm.com)