Federal officials propose breakup of PJM Interconnection amid soaring power prices

The organization responsible for keeping the lights on for roughly 67 million Americans is suddenly the subject of breakup talk in Washington. PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization spanning 13 states and the District of Columbia, is facing mounting pressure from federal officials and bipartisan state governors who want structural reforms to address electricity prices that have gone from uncomfortable to genuinely alarming.

The driving force behind this isn’t some obscure regulatory dispute. It’s AI data centers, which are consuming power at a pace that PJM’s existing infrastructure simply wasn’t designed to handle.

The numbers tell a brutal story

Look at PJM’s capacity auction results and the trajectory becomes impossible to ignore. Prices jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day for the 2024/25 delivery year to $329.17 per megawatt-day for 2026/27. That’s not a typo. That’s more than a tenfold increase in the cost of ensuring power plants are available when needed.

In English: capacity auctions are how PJM pays generators to guarantee they’ll show up during peak demand. When those prices spike, the cost flows directly to the people and businesses paying electric bills.

One auction alone added an estimated $9.4 billion in costs, translating to an 82% jump in expenses for consumers. The Natural Resources Defense Council projects that cumulative extra consumer costs could land somewhere between $100 billion and $163 billion through 2033. For context, that upper estimate is roughly the annual GDP of Hungary.

Wholesale power prices within PJM climbed 76% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, reaching $136.53 per megawatt-hour. PJM’s own independent market monitor has warned that these price impacts could become permanent without significant new supply coming online.

A bipartisan push for reform

On January 16, 2026, a group of state governors joined Trump administration Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in signing a Statement of Principles calling for major changes to how PJM operates. The document urged reforms that would accelerate new generation projects and made a pointed argument: data center operators should be paying more to fund the infrastructure upgrades their facilities demand.

The proposals currently on the table range from aggressive to radical. On the aggressive end, officials are discussing reliability backstop procurements for around 15 gigawatts of capacity, essentially a safety net ensuring enough power plants exist to keep the grid stable. There’s also a proposed price cap of $325 per megawatt-day, which would have barely trimmed the most recent auction result.

Then there’s the radical option: splitting PJM into smaller entities, or allowing utilities currently under PJM’s umbrella to join alternative regional transmission organizations.

AI data centers are the elephant in the control room

PJM’s own forecasts suggest that data center demand could increase capacity needs by more than 32 gigawatts by 2030, with some projections exceeding 50 gigawatts at peak.

PJM has begun implementing fast-track interconnection processes designed to cut through the notoriously slow queue for connecting new power plants to the grid.

What this means for energy markets and investors

If PJM implements price caps near the proposed $325 per megawatt-day level, it would theoretically limit the upside for generators participating in capacity auctions. That could discourage new investment in power plants at precisely the moment when more supply is desperately needed.

A full breakup scenario would introduce significant uncertainty into wholesale power trading. PJM currently operates the largest competitive wholesale electricity market in the world. Fragmenting it into smaller regional operators would create new market boundaries, potentially different pricing mechanisms, and transition costs that would take years to fully materialize.