PJM Interconnection, the largest US regional transmission organisation, wants a one-time reliability backstop auction at a price cap of $555 per MW-day of unforced capacity, running from 30 September to 21 October 2026 with results between 22 October and 2 December1. Utility Dive reported that the filing reached FERC on Friday 31 July; PJM's own newsroom lists no release for that date2. That $555 cap sits against the $325 per MW-day ceiling on the base auction, itself 2.5 per cent below the $333.44 cap for 2027/283.
The auction is meant to close a 6,831 MW gap against PJM's reliability requirement, the cushion of contracted capacity every RTO must hold above its expected worst hour, for the 2028/29 delivery year. That shortfall was recorded when the year's base auction cleared on 14 July 4. A separate 6,623 MW shortfall belongs to the 2027/28 delivery year and a different auction, and the two should not be run together.
PJM attributes the gap to large-load growth, projecting 70 GW of new demand by 2038 against roughly 15 GW of generation retired since 20225. Utility Dive put the cost of the new capacity at up to $20bn through 20276. That estimate appears in no PJM document: the 27 July board decision sets out the mechanism and attaches no figure to it7.
A capacity market is a mechanism for paying generators to exist rather than to run, and a backstop auction at a 71 per cent premium to the base cap is what happens when that mechanism is asked for volume on short notice. The bill reaches a household in Ohio or New Jersey through the wholesale price, for capacity procured to serve campuses that have not yet connected. Those are the same ratepayers in whose name county moratoria are argued, which is the awkward part: refusing a campus locally does nothing about the regional cost of the ones already approved.
