PJM's Third Straight Auction at the Cap Leaves It 6,831 MW Short

PJM Interconnection's capacity market has cleared at its price cap for the third auction running, and for the second time in a row it has failed to buy enough. The base residual auction for the 2028/2029 delivery year, whose results PJM announced on July 14, 2026, cleared at the cap of $325/MW-day across the whole footprint and procured less capacity than PJM's reliability standard requires. The shortfall was 6,831 MW, larger than the roughly 6,500 MW gap in the previous auction.

"These auction results show that demand for electricity continues to grow faster than electricity supply," PJM's president and chief executive, David Mills, said. The auction secured 138,318 MW of unforced capacity (UCAP) from generation and demand response. Regions under the Fixed Resource Requirement, which procure their own capacity outside the auction, added 10,864 MW, for a total of 149,182 MW. The clearing price of $325/MW-day was 2.5% lower than the $333.44/MW-day cap in the 2027/2028 auction.

Multiplying cleared supply by the price gives a total of $16.4 billion. The cleared and committed supply mix was 46% natural gas, 20% nuclear, 18% coal, 5% demand response, 4% hydro, 2% wind, 2% oil and 1% solar. The forecast peak load for the 2028/2029 delivery year was about 2,000 MW higher than the forecast used for the 2027/2028 auction. PJM said the auction "saw the continued trend of the addition of large data center loads to the load forecast that forms the basis of the reliability requirement."

PJM was explicit that the price cap does not fix the problem. The cap and floor were first introduced for the 2026/2027 and 2027/2028 auctions. The auction result matters for every customer in PJM's 13 states and the District of Columbia. The price cap limits the increase but also hides the true scarcity value of capacity.