I'm adding a map of the PJM electric grid. It includes Chicago, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, parts of Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, North Carolina and points east to the Atlantic Ocean including Maryland, Washington DC, Jersey, parts of Long Island. We need more generation plants and the only near term solutions are COAL and NATURAL GAS. Nuclear will help, but it is costly to get up and running with all the regulations and lawsuits that stand in the way. While Nuclear may be our way out of this mess, the odds of getting new commercial nuclear reactors up and running in the next 10 years are close to zero.
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Brace For Soaring Electricity Bills: Biggest US Power Grid Sets Power Costs At Record High To Feed AI | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
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FULL STORY at the link above.
Brace For Soaring Electricity Bills: Biggest US Power Grid Sets Power Costs At Record High To Feed AI
Very soon if you want AI (and even if you don't), you won't be able to afford AC.
Just this morning we warned readers that America's largest power grid, PJM Interconnect, which serves 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, DC, and more importantly feeds Deep State Central's Loudoun County, Virginia, also known as 'Data Center Alley' and which is recognized as one of the world's largest hubs for data centers...
... had recently issued multiple 'Maximum Generation' and 'Load Management' alerts this summer, as the heat pushes power demand to the brink with air conditioners running at full blast across the eastern half of the U.S.
But as anyone who has not lived under a rock knows, the deeper issue is that there's simply not enough baseload juice to feed the relentless, ravenous growth of power-hungry AI server racks at new data centers.
"There is simply no new capacity to meet new loads," said Joe Bowring to Bloomberg, president of Monitoring Analytics, which is the independent watchdog for PJM Interconnection. "The solution is to make sure that people who want to build data centers are serious enough about it to bring their own generation."
Well, there is another solution: crank up prices to the stratosphere.
And that's precisely what happened. As Bloomberg reports, business and households supplied by the largest US grid will pay $16.1 billion to ensure there is enough electricity supply to meet soaring power demand, especially that from a massive buildout in AI data centers.
The payouts to generators for the year starting June 2026 topped last year’s record $14.7 billion, according to PJM Interconnection LLC, which operates the grid stretching from the Midwest to the mid-Atlantic. That puts the capacity price per megawatt each day at a record $329.17 from $269.92.
In response to the blowout payout, shares of Constellation Energy and Talen Energy surged in late trading in New York on Tuesday.
As millions of Americans will very soon learn the hard way, AI data centers are driving the biggest surge in US electric demand in decades, leading to higher residential utility bills. That’s a key reason why PJM’s auction, once only tracked by power traders and plant owners but now increasingly a topic for general consumption as electricity bills are about to hit an all time high, has also become closely watched by politicians and consumer advocates. . .
