Catalyst with Shayle Kann - PJM and the capacity crunch

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

The PJM capacity auction this month broke records with sky-high wholesale power prices — and that was by design. Under PJM’s auction rules, tight supply raises prices, incentivizing the development of new generation and encouraging existing generation to stay online. The big driver of that tight supply? Data-center driven load growth. The independent system operator covers Virginia, one of the densest and fastest-growing regions for data center development. So will higher wholesale prices incentivize enough generation to meet load growth without provoking the public with higher bills?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Steve Piper, research director of North American power and renewables at S&P Global. Steve and Shayle cover topics like: Why Steve says PJM and other stakeholders became concerned that low prices weren’t incentivizing enough generation to stay on the market Why ISOs upping resource adequacy requirements across technologies, while raising targets for reserve margins The bottlenecks slowing down the development of new generation What’s holding back demand response in the auction Resources: Latitude Media: Will Pennsylvania be the nation’s AI-energy model?   PJM: PJM Auction Procures 134,311 MW of Generation Resources; Supply Responds to Price Signal  Utility Dive: PJM capacity prices set another record with 22% jump  Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a solar and energy storage development and procurement platform helping clients make optimal decisions, saving significant time, money, and reducing risk. Subscribers instantly access pricing, product, and supplier data. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Latitude Media covering the new frontiers of the energy transition. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. So the pricing in the early 2010s was maybe around $100 a megawatt day. Last year's clearing price was closer to $270 a megawatt day. And of course, this auction, we've cleared even higher. Coming up, we're talking about the Woodstock for electricity nerds, the PJM capacity auction. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub.

Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone.

They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fish Tank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like Fish Tank PR. To learn more about Fish Tank's approach, visit Fish, tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. I'm Shail Khan. I invest in early-stage companies at energy impact partners. Welcome. All right. So the more time that passes, the more that I want to spend time on this podcast talking about what's happening in the electricity market, the alarm bells on price and resource

adequacy are ringing louder and louder, and the downstream effects on consumers and enterprises in terms of rates are starting to show, and I think we're just at the beginning. There are so many things happening here right now, just to list a few. Data centers, obviously, but electrification in general. Gas turbine shortages and long lead times, clogged interconnection cues,

pending expiration of tax credits, executive orders, complicating those things even further. There are loan guarantees getting canceled for transmission lines, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, the ultimate question here is, what is the combined effect of all of these things. And that's nuanced and to some degree localized, but let's talk about one of the bigger alarm bells, which comes recently in the form of the annual capacity market auction in PJM, which is the grid operator for the Mid-Atlantic in the

United States, which, among other things, is home to Northern Virginia, the Data Center Hub of America. The PJM capacity market auction, nerdy as it is, gets a lot of attention in power market circles, and I think not enough elsewhere. So let's unpack the results and the implications. For this one, I had a really good conversation with Steve Piper. Steve is the Research Director for North American Power and Renewables at S&P Global. Also, for the last time, I am hosting an Ask Me Anything episode, another Ask Me Anything episode where I answer whatever questions you send, so send good ones.

This is the last call, so get your questions in now. We have a lot of really good ones already, but I promise the best ones will float to the top, and there is still time. So if you want to ask a question, email at Catalyst at Latitudemedia.com. That's Catalyst at Latitudemedia.com. Here's Steve. Steve, welcome. Thanks, Shail. All right, let's start by you explaining what the PJM capacity auction is. The old history may be stretching back 15 years or so. The concept of electric restructuring in general, was that prices that could be discovered in the marketplace would be good signals for investors. And in particular, bring private investors into the energy markets, bringing new forms of generation

technology, new applications of energy to markets where previously they were all managed by regulated utilities, right? That was the idea of restructuring. And so in a lot of markets, this got expressed in kind of two sets of prices. One are the energy market prices or the LMPs, the electricity prices that each ISO would manage and produce. And then they replace the old sort of wholesale power trading structure with sets of prices that are discoverable every five minutes, clearing those energy prices or electricity prices. But then the second price signal that was created was to signal the need for reliable capacity. And that was meant to be in more durable long-term signal of the need to construct new power plants into the future. Right. And we should say that some version of the

capacity market exists basically everywhere other than Texas, right, in the U.S. Right. I mean, Texas tries to get that reliability payment into each hour. It's a unique approach in the markets. The other markets, most notably PJM, but many markets in the eastern United States and throughout the country kind of use this sort of separate energy and capacity price construct where that price for capacity functions as a signal to investors to build new generation in the future or to uncover new sources of reliability value if you're a fan of demand response and kind of other ways to bring reliability to these markets. Right. Okay. So PJM is one of these markets. It's the wholesale market and the Mid-Atlantic.

It's a big one as far as these wholesale markets go. And they hold this capacity auction annually. Can you just kind of walk through the mechanics of like what is the capacity auction and what is it, what's it asking for? So the capacity market is asking developers of generating. holders of power plants, you know, that are running today, as well as those who may develop new power plants in the future, you know, to basically bid a price for their capacity going forward in the future. PJM historically had run this as a, what they would call them, kind of a four-years forward auction, where the price signal would be for four-year-year-old.

into the future. And this was thought to be a reliable signal in the sense of basically kind of saying, okay, if there's a good price that clears from the auction, I've got a little bit of time as a developer to bring my generation online and in service. Not every market does it that way. PJM was somewhat unique PJM in New England, but, you know, this was viewed as giving developers the lead time to bring new capacity to bear. So with that background then, PGAN was basically saying, what are we bid to build new capacity four years from now? If you were looking at a new gas-fired generation plant, you might, you know, with your knowledge as a developer, understand what it would cost to procure the turbines, procure the engineering, get all the arrangements.

in place, the supply chains, fuel to bring that plant in service into the future, you might know what lending terms you can get and your amortization, all of those details that basically say, okay, how much revenue do I need from this capacity market to get financing? What are my prospects for selling the power into the grid so that I can get return for all who might invest in my power plan. And that applies by the way, both to existing generation units that might retire, where you can bid into the capacity market to say, what do I have to get paid to keep operating, and for developers who are building new capacity, right? And like that stuff gets mixed in together in the results. Absolutely. It's an important point, right? A strong enough price signal might,

you know, signal, hey, there's going to be enough revenue in the future that, you know, as an existing asset, maybe a coal plant, maybe an older gas plant, I can invest in it, keep it online, and then be a source of reliable capacity into the future. So what does PJM do? I'll try to kind of move the process forward one step. Basically, they're going to take all of those bids, the sum total of those bids, maybe 150 gigawatts of capacity in total, and they go through. process of basically stack ranking those bids from lowest to highest, look at how those highest

bids compared to what they call a variable resource requirement curve. That is the demand curve that delivers different levels of procured capacity, which is kind of correlated with reliability, with a price. And so you can think of it as a kind of a class. economic one-on-one solution, where does that stack-rank supply cross that demand curve? And that is the price that they report out that will procure that level of capacity. At least that's what they hope. And you mentioned the four years hence thing. Is that still true today? Because I think they shortened it, right? It's a really important point. As PJM looked to revise the rules, as they face some some challenges from stakeholders before the FERC to other regulatory bodies, as they kind of

made revisions to the reliability contributions of different assets. They had to pause the auctions for a number of years, and despite efforts to catch up and get back to that four-year forward schedule, they essentially fell so far behind that now, they are in a situation where they are procuring capacity just for the next reliability year. Which is actually a key point getting to what we're going to talk about, which is the results of the auction in the past couple of years, which have been, I think, viewed as kind of a canary in the coal mine for the broader wholesale power market and capacity requirements in general, because you've got, first of all, it's worth noting, right, PJM is home to northern

Virginia, the epicenter of data center development activity. So load growth is clear and dramatic, not just in Northern Virginia, but particularly there. And so we're watching what's happening as the market reacts to all this load growth and then all the other dynamics that are at play in the electricity market, retiring existing generation, et cetera. So let's get briefly right to the heart of it. Why are we talking about the PJM capacity market here? Like, what is it that happened in the past two years, that makes it worthy of note. It's a confluence of events, just as you've described. We had a long period where the capacity prices were stable and pretty low.

Reserve margins were perceived to be high in PJM. And so when they're high, you don't need a lot of new capacity. And at least in principle, that low price should be a signal that, okay, you don't need to bring a lot of new capacity to market. PJM became concerned. Other stakeholders became concerned that those capacity prices maybe were too low and were disincentivizing investment and maybe incentivizing developers to pull capacity off the market to retire generation more quickly than is really appropriate from a reliability standpoint. This happens at the same time as, as you mentioned, demand, especially for data centers, but other types of load within PJM as well.

Think about electrification, think about electric vehicles. But data centers are certainly the lead story. At the same time as PJM is sort of like, well, we're a little concerned about the investment side of the equation. Wow, demand is also expanding very rapidly. And so you put those two pieces together. and it creates a situation where, you know, PJM felt a very strong sense of urgency to start to get the price signals right and to make them more robust. And it wasn't just Northern Virginia, as you mentioned, that's sort of the data center, center of the world. As Virginia's gotten built out and congested and actually is getting more data center built than it can handle, developers are radiating out from that trunk into western Pennsylvania, into North Carolina, you know, anywhere they can still be approximate to the trunk but not be so congested to build.

So, you know, it's the epicenter, if you will, of demand growth in PJM. You're seeing very rapid growth there. PJM wanted to get those price signals right. they made some changes to their auction rules to more appropriately reflect the reliability contribution of different resource segments, gas, solar, storage, the conventional segments, but also the new segments. And so in effect, your 100 megawatts didn't get you 100 megawatts of reliable capability in PJM anymore. It got you less than that, as PJM viewed your contribution more conservatively. And so it took more bids, if you go back to that supply curve, more stacked bids to get you up to that demand curve and add a higher price. And then, you know, last, the previous auction was kind of the first shoe to drop in a clearing price that was many multiples of what it had been the previous five or even.

10 years. Yeah, can you run through the numbers? Where had the pricing been? And then where has it been now the past two years? So the pricing in the early 2010s was maybe around $100 a megawatt day, additional sort of reforms and changes that PJM made depressed the price even more at those high reserve margins. I think we got down as low as $30 a megawatt day, barely enough to really deliver returns to merchant generation in PJM. Last year's clearing price was closer to $270 a megawatt day. So, you know, eight times more than it had been the last few auctions and, you know, much higher than it even had been historically.

And, of course, this auction, which will get to in a minute, we've cleared even higher. Yeah. So the other point is, right, these are capped price. in the auctions. So it's not like the price could go to infinity. And if I recall, in the 2024 auction, it hit the cap. So could have gone even higher in theory had it not been for the fact that there was a price cap. Absolutely. And there were concerns that prices could go even higher. A lot of stakeholders got involved. The states who were kind of concerned about the consumer impacts of high capacity prices. Because,

these flow through the bill. Consumers see the results. And they're starting to flow through even this year. It's become a very salient issue. PJM reached a settlement with the state of Pennsylvania to put a new price cap in place at about $329 per megawatt day, higher than last year, but still, you know, not as high as potentially it could have gone. And we saw that price then actually hit that cap. and clear at a new record, notwithstanding that it could have gone even higher. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched

and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near-real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energy hub.com.

We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it. Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how insane.

incentives are structured and how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you tired of overpaying for big-name PR firms, but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks instead of engaging journalists or producing content? Are you wondering why your competitors are getting press and you aren't? Fishtink PR is an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevated the work of both early stage and established companies. Whether you need to position yourself as a thought leader in between project announcements or translate complex ideas and technologies into tangible,

compelling stories that resonate with the media, F-TankP-R.com. Check out F-Tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. So I think there's sort of two dimensions to why this matters, for me at least. One is the signal that it sends about a capacity crunch, are we going to have enough, how hard is it going to be for us to get enough capacity in time? And that's the big question underlying all this demand growth across the country. How hard is it going to be to actually get this stuff built? And particularly the fact that this is an auction reflecting next year.

So all the problems that our listeners are well aware of with things like interconnection timelines make it really difficult to start a de novo project today that's going to come online. Not really difficult. Literally impossible to bring a project online next year. And so one element to this that I want to talk about is what it portends about our resource adequacy, essentially. And then the second element you alluded to, which is the other concern with all the rising demand, everything else that's happening in the market, is what it's going to end up meaning for retail prices. and obviously this is wholesale, but it flows through to retail as well.

So I kind of want to cover each of those individually. On the first one, for you, I guess in the context of PJM, and then maybe you can broaden this out to what we're seeing in other capacity markets, is this a red flag or at least a yellow flag with regard to resource adequacy, or do you think it's sort of overblown as a concern? It's a really interesting question. I think you would have to call it a red flag, you know, from the first. perspective of the need for new generation and the potential cost of the generation. I always take a step back, you know, when we talk about resource adequacy, you know, it often gets portrayed in the media as risk of blackouts and grid failures and things like that, right? And we just want to be really careful. You know, this is an economic event. That said, it's a significant economic event, right? Customers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

in Maryland, they're getting these notices, their bills are going up by 20 or 30 bucks a month, you know, starting this year as a result of last year's capacity auction price. This capacity auction that was announced last week was a good 20% higher in round numbers. And so that doesn't pretend the bills going anywhere, but even higher. And so, yeah, where the price was a signal to developers. Now it's become a very salient signal for consumers. And it's getting the kind of attention now that it's flowing through to bills. I did want to kind of come back to the point you made and sort of where we started, right? You know, PJM's auctions originally were for a four-year advance period. Now they've become compressed down to a, you know, season ahead, one.

year ahead in effect. And it doesn't really allow much time for the market to adjust to these rapidly changing signals. So to take one example, gas generation, prices like this are a strong signal for new gas generation. And turbines are being ordered. G.E. Siemens, ramping up their factories, you know, but, you know, they're one of my, just back up for a second, you know, the run-on gas turbines is such that you can't deploy very many of them next year or even two years from now. If you want to build the more complex combined cycle generation systems, they're talking about 2030. 2032, long timelines that the auction were originally structured for, but now those price signals come too quickly to merit a quick response. Or we can deploy some of the emerging technologies,

solar, wind, battery storage. These are fantastic technologies. They have a lot of deployment momentum. You can bring them in in a year or two, but they don't provide the same resource adequacy value as conventional dispatchable generation does. Maybe they'll get there. They're always improving and costs are falling, but they're also sort of caught up in this rush to meet the very near-term needs of demand growth and the strong capacity pricing that this demand growth. What about the other resource that can be deployed quickly, even more quickly than solar wind storage, and I know does qualify, or at least can qualify, for S capacity and PJM as demand response, load side resources? How has that looked in these auctions the past couple of years? How much is it scaling? What are we seeing there? It's an important contribution. I think that there have been some auctions where we've seen more demand response than you would expect, given kind of where prices settled, along with all the other resources that PJM is considered and kind of said, okay, if you bring 100 megawatts of gas generation, we count that as about 70 megawatts of reserve contribution. If you bring 100 megawatts solar, we may count that as 8 to 10 megawatts of reserve contribution. Very, very conservative, maybe appropriate, given the needs of resource adequacy. Demand response is assessed a little bit similar to gas, maybe between 60 and 70 percent of the megawatts they say they'll bring.

PJM, you know, assesses you'll bring. If you bring 100 megawatts demand response, PJN says, great, we'll count that as about 60. Under those rules, demand response kind of needs to evolve so that it can contribute more. It brought about a gigawatt to the 2024 auction, and I think a lot of stakeholders felt with a stronger price signal in place, we'd see even more demand response. We actually saw a little bit less in this auction, and I think it points to the need for the industry to kind of evolve and adapt to the rules that PJM has kind of created for their participation. Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting to. I was surprised that how little demand response we saw in the 2025 auction,

the price seems more than sufficient to incentivize at least a good amount of demand response, and like I said, you can deploy it pretty quickly. So what is it that you think the industry is not doing today? Or is it that you're saying that the capacity accreditation is insufficient? Like, what is it that's holding it back? I think there's more risk that goes along with the capacity accreditation, a lot of uncertainty around the rules, and I need to kind of start factoring in some of these new segments that are coming in. Can a data center provide load flexibility in the context of demand aggregation?

what happens if distributed storage really takes off. Does that compete with demand response, or can they sort of bring it in? I think, along with a lot of other classical sources of generation, frankly, there's a lot of uncertainty and rules that are sort of evolving a little bit on the fly. And I think there's probably a period of adaptation before you see a lot of growth in demand response. Okay, so let's broaden it out from PJM for a second. To what extent is this phenomenon that we are seeing in PJM specific to PJM versus happening all across the country? Is this a regional dynamic or a national one or somewhere in between? I think it is sufficiently widespread that you call it a national, a national dynamic.

You know, all of the grid managers, independent system operators, PGM has the biggest footprint, as we described earlier. But New York, IASO, New England, ISO, California, Texas, all the major ISOs, Midwest, Midwest ISO. have all, you know, done a sort of rigorous reevaluation of the reliability contributions of wind and solar, for instance. They've taken their best guess at battery storage, and battery storage is more complicated. It's a relatively new segment. They're trying to understand that the technology is changing pretty rapidly. You've got different durations of battery storage to consider. So I'm less confident that they've necessarily gotten it right. And that's part of the issue is that all of their assessments of reliability contributions of these different resources are kind of moving targets, given the importance of the capacity revenue stream from the developer perspective.

It creates a little more uncertainty than maybe you would like to see. But PJM has one of the older, I should say, more longer duration capacity auction markets that goes back further. So in some ways, it sits, it's sort of on the vanguard of making these changes, but every ISO has basically done two things that are noteworthy. One is they've revised the reliability contributions, particularly of wind, solar, and storage. And those revisions have almost uniformly been lower. You know, a megawatt equals significantly less than a megawatt in terms of reserve, contribution. And they've also said pretty uniformly, we want a higher target reserve margin. You know, KJM increased its target reserve margin in this past auction compared to the

2024 auction. California is updated its target. New York is updated its target. ISO New England is going through a similar process where that's likely to be the outcome. Ercots made a lot of changes. They're less impactful because it's committed to its power ahead structure. But you're seeing across the board this kind of derating of what these resources bring. And it's not just limited to the new green segments. Conventional generation comes under a lot of scrutiny, too. After Winterstorm, Uri, Texas took a close look at that generation of gas generation.

Winterstorm, Elliott, PJM, took a close look at gas generation, made a lot of these revisions. So, you know, if you think about reducing those assessments of reliability contribution, but increasing your planning reserve targets, you're saying, well, we want more, but what generators bring is less, then, you know, it's a very strong signal to bring new generation to market. and in larger quantities than previous. And so the prices to incentivize that can really only go in one direction, and that's up. Which means retail prices can also only go, at least this component of retail prices can only go in one direction, which is up. It flows right into the retail rates. The utilities that serve the customers have to pay those bills and they have to pass those bills through. Yeah.

All right, Steve, thank you for illuminating me on the last. latest PJM capacity auction. Thank you so much for the time. Shale, thank you. Steve Piper is the research director for North American Power and Renewables at S&P Global. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to Latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst.