$7.3 Billion of PJM's Capacity Bill Traces to Data Centers, Says the Market Monitor

When PJM Interconnection published the results of its 2026/2027 Base Residual Auction on July 22, the headline was the price. Every zone in the footprint cleared at $329.17 per megawatt-day of unforced capacity, the cap agreed with Pennsylvania's governor and approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The total bill came to about $16.1 billion, up from $14.7 billion a year earlier and from $2.2 billion for the 2024/2025 delivery year. The question that followed was how much of that cost is a direct consequence of data centers.

On October 1 the Independent Market Monitor for PJM, Monitoring Analytics, gave a precise answer. In the first part of its analysis of the auction, it re-ran the clearing without the existing and forecast data center load that PJM had built into its 2026 peak forecast. The monitor took the same supply offers that cleared in July and replaced the demand side with a version of the variable resource requirement curve built from a load forecast that excluded data centers, including both load already embedded in history and forecast load above that embedded level.

The monitor also pointed to growth in the data center adjustment itself. In the forecast used for the 2025/2026 auction, existing and planned data center load was 7,892 MW. PJM's auction report notes that the BGE and Dominion zones had cleared at $466.35 and $444.26 in the previous auction, and that the rest of the RTO had cleared at $269.92. PJM said the cleared volume, plus capacity committed by utilities under the Fixed Resource Requirement alternative, was just 139 MW above the reliability requirement.

PJM's presentation to its Markets and Reliability Committee noted 2,669 MW of unforced capacity from new generation and uprates offered and cleared, reversing a decline over the previous three auctions. PJM estimated that the cap price would translate to year-over-year increases of 1.5% to 5% in some customers' bills, depending on how utilities and states pass through wholesale costs. The monitor's figure is not a bill that can be sent to any one customer.