The grid that powers 65 million people just got 76% more expensive

I was reading a Bloomberg headline last week when one number stopped me cold.

Seventy-six.

That's how much power prices jumped on PJM in a single quarter. PJM is the largest electric grid in America. It covers 65 million people. Thirteen states plus D.C. And in three months, electricity got 76 percent more expensive.

The cause wasn't a cold snap. No pipeline failed. No storm hit. It was data centers.

I'm releasing a restricted intelligence briefing on a "Hidden Inheritance."

This is the result of 20 years of work by the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf Project.

In December, federal filings finally revealed the coordinates of this discovery.

American investors can now position themselves for a $500 trillion resource windfall.

This is made possible through one small public company already holding the key partnerships.

Most Americans have no idea the U.S. just added territory larger than Texas and California combined.

I don't know how long I can keep this briefing online before the "insiders" try to pull it.

See the official coordinates and the ticker here.

See the ticker and the $500T Briefing here >>

Data centers now eat 6 percent of all U.S. electricity. Two years ago that was closer to 4. The total power draw has hit 67.7 gigawatts — a 36 percent jump in just 24 months. More than 700 new facilities are under construction across 38 states.

The grid wasn't designed for this. Utilities are scrambling to add transmission lines and substations. That costs money. A lot of it. And right now, most of that cost gets spread across ratepayer bills — not tech company invoices.

A federal watchdog report landed last week. The message was direct: tech companies should be paying for the grid infrastructure their data centers depend on. The watchdog called the price spike "irreversible" without structural change. It wants the companies driving demand to start writing bigger checks for the pipes they use.

Consider what those companies are actually spending. Amazon's capital expenditures hit $44.2 billion in Q1 alone. That's one quarter. Microsoft spent $30.9 billion. Meta went from $13 billion to $20 billion in year-over-year quarterly capex. Alphabet added $35.7 billion. Together, the four biggest hyperscalers will spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 — nearly double what they spent in 2025.

These are not companies short on capital.

The public is catching up too. In just the first four months of 2026, Americans rejected or restricted more data centers than in all of 2025 — 79 this year against 49 last year. A Quinnipiac poll found 78 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents, and 56 percent of Republicans opposed to data centers in their communities. That's rare bipartisan agreement.

In Virginia alone, data centers already consume more than one in four kilowatt-hours generated in the state.

When one customer class drives a 76 percent price spike on the largest grid in America, the argument for having them pay their share gets very hard to ignore.

A number from the Energy Information Administration caught me off guard this month.

Twenty-four gigawatts.

That's how much new battery storage America is adding to its grid in 2026. Last year's record was 15. That's a 60 percent jump in twelve months.

More than half of it lands in one state. Texas takes 53 percent of all new capacity. California is second at 14. Arizona is third at 13.

Texas makes sense. The ERCOT grid swings hard. Wind blows at night and power prices drop. Demand spikes at noon and prices spike with it. Batteries make money on those gaps. Charge when it's cheap. Discharge when it's not. For data center operators, a battery-backed Texas grid starts to look like a serious option for powering workloads around the clock.

The hardware keeps getting cheaper too. Lithium iron phosphate cells — LFP — now win nearly every utility-scale bid. They took 95 percent of new awards globally in the past two years. Prices have settled in the $55–75 per kilowatt-hour range. Five years ago that number was above $150.

Batteries handle the swings. But they can't carry base load. That's what nuclear is for.

Last week, Amazon, X-energy, and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power announced a partnership to deploy advanced small modular reactors. The goal is to mobilize up to $50 billion in public and private investment. X-energy's Xe-100 reactor runs on high-temperature gas-cooled technology — purpose-built for the kind of 24/7 reliability a data center needs. The DOE also moved, awarding $94 million last week to eight companies accelerating light-water SMR development.

The grid data centers need looks like this: batteries for the swings, nuclear for the base. Both are being built faster than most people realize.