THE GRID
Your Power Bill Is Subsidizing AI
$136.53.
That's what one megawatt-hour of wholesale power cost in the PJM grid this past quarter. A year ago, that same megawatt-hour cost $77.78. That's a 75.5% jump in twelve months.
PJM is the biggest power market in the country. It serves 67 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. And its own watchdog just said what most of us could already feel in our wallets.
"The price impacts on customers have been very large and are not reversible."
Not reversible. Sit with that.
I read that line twice. In most markets, a price spike goes up, then comes back. This one won't. It's baked in.
The cause is no mystery. Data centers. The market monitor found that data center load in PJM's last two capacity auctions added $23.1 billion in costs. Capacity costs alone surged 398% in Q1.
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Energy makes up 71.5% of the wholesale cost. Capacity — the price of keeping plants ready for peak demand — is just 13%. But that 13% surged 398% in one quarter. That small slice is now breaking your bill.
Last year, PJM's total wholesale bill hit $67 billion — up 54% from $43.5 billion in 2024. This year is running even hotter.
And the load keeps growing. PJM projects 32 GW of peak demand growth by 2030. About 30 GW of that comes from data centers. The grid has never had to absorb that kind of load this fast.
The gap between supply and demand is widening. In the latest capacity auction, PJM came up 6,520 MW short of its own reserve target. Two years ago, that gap barely existed.
The market monitor's fix is blunt. Make data centers bring their own power. Don't let them plug in until the grid can handle the load.
That echoes what the White House asked Big Tech to do with its Ratepayer Protection Pledge back in March. But pledges aren't rules. And the bills keep rising.
Right now, 67 million Americans are paying more for electricity so data centers can train AI models. That's not a theory. It's a line item on your power bill.
An Elon Musk Fan's Warning About SPCX
Jon Najarian is one of Elon Musk's biggest believers on Wall Street. He called Tesla in 2014 when legacy automakers were calling it a delusional toy company.
So when Jon tells investors to skip SPCX — the largest IPO in stock market history — it's worth listening.
To be clear: He's not bearish on Elon. He's bearish on the math.
VOLTAGE
Quanta Printed Something Worth Noticing
New York has lost 1.5 gigawatts of power generation since 2019.
That's the headline from the NYISO Power Trends 2026 report, released last week. The state's grid operator warned that old fossil fuel plants — many over 50 years old — are shutting down before clean energy can fill the gap.
NYISO President and CEO Rich Dewey called this "a defining moment" for the state's electric system.
The numbers tell the story. Since 2019, retirements have cut 1.5 GW from the system. New renewable additions haven't kept pace. And now a wave of large-load requests — data centers, battery plants, chip fabs — is straining a grid that was already running tight.
The pressure comes from two directions. On the demand side, electrification of buildings and transport is adding load. Large energy-intensive projects stack on top of that. On the supply side, retirements are outpacing new builds.
Winter is the sharpest risk. NYISO says prolonged cold spells since 2023 have pushed the grid toward emergency responses. Gas plants can freeze. Renewables drop off. Heating demand spikes. The margin for error keeps shrinking.
The state wants to electrify everything. It also wants to attract data centers. It can't do both at the current pace of supply additions.
New York's grid was built for a slower world. That world is gone. The question now is whether new supply can arrive before the margin disappears entirely.
WIRED IN
Four Signals From the Grid Fight
Maryland draws the line. Eighty state lawmakers told FERC on June 17 they support a complaint against PJM's transmission cost rules. Maryland has been assigned $2 billion for grid projects that serve data centers in other states — mostly Virginia. The bill to consumers: $1.6 billion over the next decade.
The cost fight is only part of the problem. The transformer wall is just as real. A new high-voltage transformer takes up to 60 months to build. A data center takes 18. That mismatch helps explain why an estimated 11 GW of U.S. data center capacity faces delays this year. The bottleneck is no longer money or chips. It's the physical grid hardware.
Those delays make the grid projects already in motion even more contested. PJM has advanced $22 billion in transmission projects through its competitive procurement windows in the last three years. Who pays for those lines is now the central fight — and Maryland's complaint argues the states that didn't order the data centers shouldn't foot the bill.
Some states have stopped waiting for a ruling. New York's legislature passed a one-year moratorium on large data center permits June 5 — any facility drawing 20 MW or more. Governor Hochul hasn't committed to signing. If she does, New York becomes the first state with a statewide data center construction pause. The grid fight has moved from engineering to politics. And politics moves faster
