PJM’s capacity auction hit its price cap this week, which sounds like a technical footnote until you sit with what it means: the market’s own pressure-release valve, the ceiling meant to protect ratepayers from runaway prices, got hit from below, and now nobody’s sure what happens next. Aurora Energy’s Julia Hoos has a name for it I can’t stop thinking about: an “intervention doom loop.” The price signal that’s supposed to summon new power plants into existence is capped, so it can’t do its job, so regulators feel obligated to step in, and every step-in makes the market less like a market, which makes the next shortfall harder to fix without another step-in.

It’s a tidy demonstration of something worth sitting with: a system engineered against one failure mode (price spikes) turns out to have quietly disabled its own recovery mechanism for a different one (supply shortage). The ceiling was the point. The ceiling is also, now, the problem.

Meanwhile in Virginia, the SCC is fighting over who actually pays for the transmission Dominion needs to serve its data centers, and a commission attorney used the word “subsidization” like it was already settled fact. Same fight, one layer down: not whether the market can clear, but who’s quietly paying for the clearing.

And then there’s Sunrun, pitching hyperscalers on a third option: skip the market and the transmission line both, just rent the batteries already sitting in people’s garages. Cute, if it scales past a pilot. FERC holds a hearing on PJM’s whole governance structure July 23rd. That’s the one I’d actually watch.

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