Key Points:
PJM's 2025-2026 capacity auction cleared at $269.92/MW-day, an 833% jump from $28.92 the prior year, with data centers driving 63% of the increase.
If load growth holds, the average PJM household is forecast to pay $70 more per month by 2028, with cumulative costs of $100 billion to $163 billion through 2033.
Special Report: The energy story near the Grand Canyon (from Behind The Market)
The June 30 order marks the third DOE Section 202(c) emergency issued in the PJM footprint in six months, versus a historical baseline of once every several years.
Yesterday afternoon, someone at the Energy Department signed an order. Dry language. Boring format. And with that signature, the rules changed across 13 states.
The order tells power plants they can break pollution limits if they need to. It tells AI data centers to unplug from the grid and run on their own diesel backups. It is the same tool used when a hurricane knocks out half the grid.
This time there is no hurricane. Just heat. And too many computers.
I can't stop thinking about this. The order runs three days. And it is already the third one like it this year. Not the third emergency in a decade. The third in six months.
Elon Musk: "Do you Like Minting Money?"
Elon Musk called lithium refining a “license to print money.”
He is right. Here is why.
Global lithium demand is set to grow 5X by 2040. Every EV battery needs up to 60 kilograms of it. AI data centers runs on it. And the old supply chain cannot keep up.
That is why General Motors led a $50 million round into a private company called EnergyX.
What GM saw was simple. The old way of mining lithium takes 18 months and leaves most of the metal in the dirt. EnergyX built a patented system that pulls out 3X more, and it does it in days.
That’s why GM wrote the check.
And now you can invest alongside with them, until July 16.
If the grid still cannot hold, PJM has to start cutting power on purpose. First a partial cut across whole regions. Then rolling blackouts, block by block. They have not gone there yet. But the tools they save for a Cat 5 hurricane are already off the shelf. In late June. Before the worst of summer even hits.
Here is the picture. PJM runs the grid for 67 million people across 13 states. From Illinois down to North Carolina. This week the grid may hit 166,304 megawatts of demand. That would break a record set in 2006. A record that stood for 20 years.
Twenty years is a long time. Something changed. And it changed fast. It is not the weather. Heat waves happen. The change is what is now plugged into the grid on the other end.
Data centers. Buildings full of servers that run AI, cloud storage, and search. Their appetite for power is huge. And it grew faster than anyone planned.
Picture what is happening tonight in Northern Virginia. Rows of warehouses the size of Walmart stores. Inside, thousands of servers. Out back, walls of diesel tanks. Those generators are firing up right now. Burning fuel into a heat wave. So my house and yours can keep the AC on.
Those diesel generators do not have the same pollution controls that a normal power plant has. They pump soot and smog into the neighborhoods around the data centers. Places where kids ride bikes. Where retirees open the windows in the morning. That is the trade being made this week. Their air for our air conditioning.
The Biggest Names in Food Are Testing This New Tech
What do the world’s three biggest foodservice providers, the biggest food manufacturer, and some of the industry’s most beloved brands have in common?
They’re all partnering with Automated Retail Technologies (ART) to serve food without kitchens or delivery.
With ART’s Just Baked™ automated robotic kiosks, serving peoples’ favorite meals 24/7 is affordable and easy. That’s why the foodservice giants Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass Group joined Nestlé and White Castle as ART partners.
And ART’s 800 units deployed currently only scratches the surface of their growth plans. They have 400 more units ready for immediate deployment, 340,000+ additional targeted locations, and a leadership team that knows exactly what it takes to scale. In other words, ART is perfectly positioned.
Here is the number I keep coming back to. PJM holds an auction each year to line up power for the future. The price to reserve one megawatt for a day went from $28.92 to $269.92. That is an 833% jump. In one year. Data centers drove almost two thirds of it.
That auction alone added $9.3 billion in costs. That money does not come from Amazon. It does not come from Google. It comes from the households whose meters spin near those server farms. It comes from us.
The average family in PJM is looking at about $70 more on their power bill each month by 2028. That is $840 a year. To keep the servers cool for someone else's chatbot.
I get it. The AI boom is real. It brings jobs. It brings tax dollars. Nobody wants to be the county that says no.
But here is what worries me. These emergency orders used to be rare. Hurricanes. Ice storms. Once every few years, if that. Now the government is signing them because the grid cannot keep up with a normal summer.
That is a new baseline. Not a bad week. Not bad luck. The load keeps climbing. And it climbs faster than the grid can grow with it.
New power plants take five to seven years to build. New data centers take twelve to eighteen months. That gap is where our bills live. And it keeps getting wider.
Nobody knows how far this goes. Some studies say PJM customers face $100 billion in extra costs by 2033. Others say $163 billion. Either way, the money lands on families.
I don't think most people realize how quiet this shift has been. There was no vote. No ballot measure. No town hall. The government just started signing hurricane-grade orders. Every few months. On weeks that used to feel like any other week.
The order this week lasts through Thursday. After the fireworks. After the cookouts. Most people will forget about it by Friday.
I won't. Because when I turn on the AC tonight, I will think about a retiree in Ohio whose July bill just went up $70. She did not build a data center. She did not ask for AI. She is paying for it anyway.
That is the story of this heat wave. Not the temperature. Not the record. The pollution rules on hold. The diesel smoke rising from server farms. The bills piling up in mailboxes across 13 states.
Nobody voted on any of this. Nobody asked us.
More on this tomorrow.
— Lauren
Editor, American Ledger
