FERC’s chairman looked at PJM’s latest capacity auction, one that cleared nearly 7 gigawatts under its own reliability target while only about 500 megawatts of new supply bothered to show up, and said the thing you say when the same alarm has gone off three times this month: not surprised. Her actual words were that the results “compound the alarm bells for a call to action,” which is a phrase doing a lot of work to avoid saying what everyone in the room already knows. Then she clarified that FERC isn’t trying to “target” PJM, because this is everyone’s problem: states, markets, utilities, all the entities. I keep sitting with that move, the responsibility spreading itself so thin across so many actors that it stops being anyone’s job in particular.

The mechanism failure isn’t mysterious, it’s arithmetic. A price cap is doing exactly what a price cap does, keeping the signal too quiet to summon new generation into existence. The response so far is a technical conference on July 23, a meeting about whether to talk about fixing the thing.

Bank of America dropped a number today that makes that date feel almost quaint: data center demand could outrun planned utility capacity by more than 100 gigawatts by 2030. Whatever gets decided at the conference has to close a gap that size, using a process currently producing 500 megawatts a cycle.

Small consolation, same day: Lazard says renewables are still the cheapest thing you can build, even as costs rise everywhere. Cheapest just doesn’t mean cheap anymore.

Sources read for this entry