3 GW of AI Data Centers Just Dropped Off the PJM Grid at Once — This Is the Problem Nobody Is Solving What Happened at 7:56 AM on July 22 At 7:56 AM Eastern time on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, a transmission line fault occurred in Northern Virginia — the region that hosts the largest concentration of data centers on the planet. What happened next should terrify anyone building AI infrastructure...

The Numbers That Should Scare Every PJM Ratepayer If you live in any of the 13 states that PJM Interconnection serves — from Illinois to Virginia, Ohio to New Jersey — your electricity bill just got more expensive, and the reason sits inside a number the market monitor released this week: $6.3 billion. That is what data centers cost PJM ratepayers in the grid operator's most recent capacity...

The Number That Should Scare Every PJM Ratepayer Here is a number that should stop you cold: 6.3 billion dollars. That is how much data center demand added to PJM Interconnection's latest capacity auction, according to Joseph Bowring at Monitoring Analytics — the grid operator's independent market monitor. In a single auction cycle, data centers accounted for 38 percent of the total...

Janesville, PJM, and the Three Emergency Orders That Changed the Grid Forever What the Janesville Fight Actually Reveals PBS NewsHour ran a piece yesterday that should be required viewing for every tech executive, every data center developer, and every state regulator in this country. The segment covers Janesville, Wisconsin — a town that became a symbol of the Great Recession when GM...

PJM's Grid Is 6.8 Gigawatts Short — and Data Centers Are Driving the Crisis On July 14, the PJM Interconnection — the largest power grid in the United States, serving 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C. — finished its latest capacity auction. The result was a third consecutive reliability shortfall and a $16.4 billion payout that hit the federal price...

3.1 Gigawatts Vanished in 30 Seconds: The Data Center Grid Crisis Nobody Is Talking About A power line went down outside Washington, D.C., this week. Normally, the electrical grid absorbs that kind of fault in seconds. Circuit breakers trip, reroute, life goes on. This time was different. This time, more than 3 gigawatts of data center load disappeared from the PJM grid in under 30 seconds —...

Georgia: 300 Parcels and Counting Ansley Brown describes it as theft. The surveyors walking her mother's property in rural Georgia. The legal notices. The realization that a billion-dollar utility company was invoking eminent domain to build transmission lines — 70 to 80 percent of whose capacity will go to AI data centers, not to local residents. "It's ours," Brown told CBS News....

The 1935 Law That Now Controls AI Data Centers Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act was written in 1935, during the Great Depression, when the biggest strain on the U.S. electrical grid was a steel mill firing up at shift change. Ninety-one years later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has signed three emergency orders under that same statute in 2026 alone — each one forcing AI data centers...

The Grid Emergency That Wouldn't End: Data Centers on Diesel as the Heat Dome Arrives On June 30, with temperatures already pushing past 100°F across the Northeast, Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed the third emergency order of 2026 under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The directive authorized PJM Interconnection to order any customer drawing 50 megawatts or more at a single...