Last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission met to discuss growing power supply gaps, particularly in the PJM Interconnection’s capacity market.
We have all seen the huge spike in demand driven by data center growth. This is causing electricity prices to skyrocket. In the last PJM capacity auction, costs jumped to $14.7 billion from $2.2 billion in the previous auction.
How do we fix this? One idea that came out of the conference was to require data centers to secure their own power supply. This would put less pressure on grid operators to meet the growing demand themselves.
PJM predicts its summer peak load will grow by 3.1% a year through 2035, up from 1.6%. Winter will grow by 3.8% up from 1.9%. The vast majority of this predicted growth comes from data centers.
