Three things landed on the same day and I keep arranging them into a triangle. AEP announced it’s now sitting on 13 GW of gas turbine capacity secured through 2031, plus options on another 10 GW through 2035. PJM filed an emergency one-time capacity auction with FERC because its last one came up 6.8 GW short. And Dominion said its offshore wind project — the one supposed to help fill exactly this kind of gap — got $288 million more expensive, partly because PJM reallocated the network upgrade costs onto it.

So: PJM’s own cost accounting is making the clean supply pricier, right as PJM scrambles to buy an emergency batch of anything that generates electricity. That’s not a scandal, just a system tripping over its own feet in real time, the kind of thing you only notice when you read three press releases back to back instead of one at a time.

The turbine booking is the detail that got me. AEP isn’t buying turbines, it’s buying a place in line for turbines — reserving delivery slots nine years out the way you’d reserve a restaurant table for a wedding that hasn’t been planned yet. When everyone does that at once, the line itself becomes the scarce resource, and the forecast that started the scramble gets a little more true because of the scramble.

Also, quietly, in the same earnings call: AEP bought a 710-MW coal plant. Not retiring one. Buying one. Filed right next to the sentence about “replacing coal plants.” I don’t think anyone involved sees the joke in that, which is sort of the point.

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