THE GRID
PJM Interconnection serves 67 million people across 13 states. It runs the biggest competitive electricity market in the world. And according to its own analysis, starting this summer, it will have just enough power to keep the lights on.
Not a comfortable surplus. Not a cushion for a heat wave. Just enough. Data centers are connecting faster than new supply can be built. PJM has no authority, right now, to stop those connections — even when there isn't enough electricity to go around.
20 Years Of Silence Is Over
The biggest financial story in America isn't trending on Twitter.
It isn't on the front page of the Journal.
There is a virtual media blackout on a massive discovery.
A 20-year task force just unlocked $500 trillion in "potato-shaped" mineral rocks.
These minerals are sitting right on the U.S. seabed.
One small company is already positioned to benefit.
They are moving before the news goes mainstream.
Once this hits mainstream coverage, the ground-floor price will be history.
In December 2025, PJM's capacity auction came up 6,625 megawatts short of reliability requirements for 2027–2028. Prices hit $333.44 per megawatt-day — a record. That's not a small data point. That price spike rolls directly into residential and commercial electricity bills across Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, and a dozen other states.
The transmission bottleneck has shifted from a future problem to a present one. As of January 2026, PJM reported over 21 GW of projects in engineering procurement status and another 8.2 GW under construction — but the wires needed to energize them haven't been built yet. The interconnection agreement and the transformer are two very different things.
PJM responded in February 2025 with a $6.7 billion regional transmission plan — the largest in its history. That money will eventually ease the Northern Virginia bottleneck that is strangling data center growth in the world's densest data center market. But transmission takes years to build. The AI boom is moving in months. To understand the scale of incoming demand: through November 2025, PJM had received approximately 54 GW of large-load interconnection requests — most of them data centers. The grid simply wasn't designed to absorb that volume in this timeframe.
Data centers are connecting to the grid faster than new power supply can be built. Starting in summer 2026, PJM will have just enough power to keep the grid reliable — with no cushion for a heat wave or an unexpected outage.
Meanwhile, PJM's next load forecast projects a summer peak rising from 154 GW in 2025 to 210 GW by 2036. Data centers account for nearly all of that increase — PJM's own auction report found that approximately 5,100 MW of the 5,250 MW rise in peak load forecast for 2027–2028 is attributable to data centers.
The grid is not a passive backdrop to the AI story. It is the constraint. The companies that understand that — and invest accordingly — will own the next decade.
VOLTAGE
Three Risks the Market Isn't Pricing Right
Transformers are the new semiconductor shortage. Two data centers in Silicon Valley have reportedly been built and are sitting dark — fully constructed, unable to operate — because the transformers needed to supply power are unavailable. Transformer manufacturers are carrying multi-year, billion-dollar backlogs. CenterPoint Energy alone saw large-load interconnection requests jump from 1 GW to 8 GW between late 2023 and late 2024 — a 700% surge. Every one of those requests needs equipment. The supply chain for grid hardware hasn't caught up, and it won't quickly. Projects missing 2026–2028 start dates face cost increases of 30–50% as clean-energy tax credit windows close. That risk isn't reflected in data center valuations.
Interconnection queue backlogs are costing ratepayers billions — and the fixes are slow. Analysis from GridLab found that had just 10% of the renewable and battery projects already in PJM's interconnection queue been built in time for the 2026–27 delivery year, capacity auction prices would have dropped by an estimated $3.5 billion. They weren't built in time. The regulatory and permitting bottlenecks that caused that delay are still mostly in place. FERC has reform proposals in motion. But reform timelines and grid timelines don't move at the same speed.
Constellation Energy's Three Mile Island restart just hit a transmission wall. In a March 31 FERC filing, Constellation warned that the restarted Three Mile Island Unit 1 — one of the most watched nuclear-for-AI deals in the country — may not be "fully deliverable" within PJM until significant transmission upgrades are completed. The plant produces power. The grid can't always receive it. This is the hidden cost of the nuclear revival story: the wires connecting yesterday's plants to tomorrow's demand centers are often the last thing anyone budgets for — and the first thing that causes delays.
The Sleep Window That Closes After Midnight
There's a specific 90 minute window each night when your body does 70% of its physical recovery.
Miss that window and no amount of sleep makes up for it.
You wake up tired. You feel foggy. You crash by mid afternoon. Sound familiar?
A sleep doctor from Johns Hopkins found that one simple 30 second routine before bed helps the body hit this recovery window consistently. He tested it on 2,400 men and the results were clear:
Faster time to deep sleep. Fewer middle of the night wake ups. More energy on waking.
Over 36,000 men have already tried it. It costs nothing and takes less than a minute.
P.S. The researcher says missing this window is the single biggest reason men feel exhausted no matter how long they sleep.
WIRED IN
The Eversource CEO Said What Everyone Else Was Thinking
During Q1 2026 earnings, the CEO of Eversource Energy said it plainly: he is "not interested" in data centers. His reason? They are "only going to drive up the price of energy."
He's not alone. Executives from American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, PPL, and Vistra all flagged PJM interconnection problems on their earnings calls. The utility sector, which spent years pitching data centers as saviors of load growth, is now split down the middle.
Rate increase requests from utilities have been accelerating across the country, driven by rising infrastructure costs and load growth. Overall power bills have risen roughly 40% since 2021. A Carnegie Mellon study estimates data centers and cryptocurrency mining could push the average U.S. electricity bill up 8% by 2030 — and over 25% in northern Virginia markets.
The political pressure is real. East Coast Democrats made electricity affordability a centerpiece of state races last fall and won. President Trump held a White House event in March calling on big tech to pay "the full cost of their energy and infrastructure, no matter what." Midterm elections loom later this year, and rising power bills are near the top of voter concern lists.
Michigan offers the sharpest example of where this is heading. DTE Energy said it would freeze rates for two years if an Oracle and OpenAI data center comes online as planned. The attorney general likened the announcement to a "ransom note." It shows how fraught the politics have become. A data center that was supposed to be an economic win is now a bargaining chip in a utility rate fight.
Oregon moved first with real teeth. The POWER Act requires large electricity users to pay the full cost of grid infrastructure built specifically for them. At least 38 new large-load tariffs have been established nationally since 2018, with 30 of them created in 2025 and 2026 alone. The regulatory environment is moving — but slowly, and unevenly.
The affordability fight isn't slowing data center growth. But it is reshaping who pays for the grid that powers it — and that bill is coming due before the midterms.
