The White House and 13 Governors Tell PJM to Make Data Centers Pay
The politics of data center power in the mid-Atlantic changed on January 15, 2026. The National Energy Dominance Council, chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with Energy Secretary Chris Wright as vice chair, signed a Statement of Principles Regarding PJM with the governors of the states in the PJM Interconnection region. The next day, PJM's Board of Managers issued its own decisional letter on large load additions. Together, the two documents set the terms for the most consequential market redesign PJM has attempted in years.
According to a summary by the law firm Latham & Watkins, the White House and governors called on PJM to hold a Reliability Backstop Auction to procure new capacity, starting no later than September 2026, and to give new resources that clear in it 15 years of price certainty. On cost, the principles say PJM should allocate the cost of capacity bought through the backstop to load-serving entities with new data centers that have not self-procured new capacity or agreed to be curtailable.
The principles also asked PJM to extend the capacity price collar, which set a floor and cap for the 2026/2027 and 2027/2028 auctions, to the next two auctions at the current level. The Board proposed defining large load additions as individual additions of 50 MW or more at a single point of interconnection, and directed staff to implement forecasting reforms including state review of large load requests, measures against duplicate requests and more third-party review.
PJM's most recent auction, for the 2027/2028 delivery year, cleared 5.6% below the target reserve margin, according to Latham & Watkins, the first time the market had failed to procure enough capacity. The 13 states involved, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, span both parties. For data center developers, the principles change the calculation in three ways.