The Midcontinent Independent System Operator released the results of its 2026 Planning Resource Auction on April 28, and the headline is relief rather than alarm. For the June 2026 to May 2027 planning year, summer capacity cleared at $424.30 per megawatt-day in Local Resource Zones 1 through 7, which cover parts of eleven states from Montana to Michigan. Zones 8 and 10 in Arkansas and Mississippi cleared at $384.10, and Zone 9, covering most of Louisiana and southeast Texas, at $412.10. A year earlier, the summer price in the northern and central zones was $666.50. Prices in the other seasons fell much further: $33.92 for fall, $35.97 for winter and $7.61 for spring.
MISO says the system has enough capacity in every season. Summer cleared with a reserve margin 3.5 percentage points above the 7.9% planning reserve margin target. Annualized across the four seasons, the price works out to $126.19 per megawatt-day in the North and Central subregion, $116.06 in Zones 8 and 10, and $123.12 in Zone 9.
Why prices fell
The main reason is supply. MISO's vice president of system planning and competitive transmission, Aubrey Johnson, said capacity offered into the auction grew by as much as 4% in each season compared with last year. More offers against a demand curve that did not move as much produce a lower price. The fall, winter and spring results also show the effect of more accredited capacity in shoulder seasons, when fewer units are on planned maintenance outages and solar and wind accreditation is more favorable.
The reliability-based demand curve, now in its second year, shapes the outcome as well. Instead of the old vertical demand curve, which produced either a price near zero or a price at the cost of new entry depending on whether the market was short by a single megawatt, the new curve slopes. It pays more for capacity as the system approaches minimum reliability requirements and less as it moves above them. That makes the auction less volatile and gives a more graded signal about scarcity.
Where data centers fit
Summer is still tight, and MISO said so: its release describes summer prices as reflecting a tighter balance between supply and demand. Johnson added that the region is growing quickly and that MISO is working with members and states to keep pace. The load growth is real. MISO's December 2024 long-term load forecast white paper projected coincident peak load rising from 122 GW in 2024 to between 152 and 186 GW by 2044. It attributed 149 to 241 TWh of additional energy demand by 2044 to data centers, the largest single driver, ahead of electrification of transport and buildings and industrial reshoring.
The forecast notes something that tells you where that load shows up first: Expedited Project Review requests, the process MISO uses to evaluate transmission needs too urgent for the regular planning cycle, rose from one in the 2020 transmission expansion plan cycle to 15 in the 2024 cycle, driven by large load additions. Most of those requests come from utilities trying to serve specific large customers, often data centers, on timelines that the normal process could not meet.
NERC's 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment reported MISO's forecast peak total internal demand reaching 127 GW in summer 2026, up more than 2.6 GW from the projection for the same year in the 2024 assessment, and growing to 143.7 GW by 2035. NERC observed that much of MISO's load growth comes from large computational loads whose operating characteristics are still being evaluated.
The supply response
The other half of the story is MISO's effort to bring new generation online quickly. In July 2025 FERC approved the Expedited Resource Addition Study, a temporary process that allows up to 68 projects to be studied, ten per quarter, if each addresses a specific load addition or resource adequacy need verified by the relevant state regulator and can be in commercial operation within three to six years. It sunsets on August 31, 2027. The first ten projects selected in September 2025 totaled about 5,300 MW, including five natural gas plants, three solar projects, a wind farm and a battery, with in-service dates in 2027 and 2028. Forty-seven requests totaling 26,500 MW had been submitted at that point.
NERC's sensitivity analysis of the expedited process found MISO projecting more than 50 GW of accredited capacity additions by summer 2029, about half of it from expedited projects. If those resources arrive, the margin in future auctions should hold. If they slip, as new generation often does, the summer margin could narrow again just as large loads ramp up.
Who pays
The auction price matters less in MISO than in PJM because most load-serving entities in MISO self-supply or contract for capacity before the auction. Those buying in the auction pay the clearing price, and those with surplus sell at the same price. That structure, built around vertically integrated utilities with state-approved resource plans, means data center costs in MISO run mainly through utility rate cases and integrated resource plans rather than through a single auction price.
That changes the political dynamics. In Louisiana, Indiana, Michigan and elsewhere in MISO, the arguments over data centers happen at state commissions approving new gas plants, special contracts and large load tariffs. The auction result is a useful thermometer, but the real decisions about who pays for data center capacity are made in those proceedings.
What to watch
Three things will shape next year's auction. The first is whether the expedited generation projects stay on schedule. The second is how fast contracted data center load ramps, because a campus that signs for hundreds of megawatts may take several years to reach full draw. The third is the forecast itself. All NERC assessment areas, including MISO, will provide new load projections for the 2026 assessment in July, and those numbers will show whether the large computational loads in MISO's pipeline are firming up or slipping. A higher forecast moves the demand curve to the right, and with summer already cleared only 3.5 points above target, it would not take much additional load to push prices back toward last year's levels. For now, MISO has bought enough capacity at a lower price than last year. The data center buildout means it will have to do the same again next spring with a higher requirement.