This Week in Voltage
Seventy-six percent. That's how much wholesale power prices jumped in PJM — the grid covering 67 million people from Virginia to Illinois — in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025. The independent market monitor put the number at $136.53 per megawatt-hour, up from $77.78 a year ago, and named data centers as the primary driver. The monitor's language was blunt: "The price impacts on customers have been very large and are not reversible."
The conservation crowd will read that sentence as an indictment. I read it as a forcing function.
When demand outpaces supply this visibly, this expensively, the political pressure to build becomes overwhelming. PJM's own white paper this month warned the region could face supply shortfalls as early as next year. That's not a crisis — that's a construction mandate arriving with a price tag attached. The $13 billion cost increase baked into the last two capacity auctions isn't a scandal. It's the market screaming build faster.
The NRC Is Finally Listening
Here's what makes this moment different from every previous AI-demand alarm: the permitting machinery is actually moving. NRC Chairman Ho Nieh has been describing a "sea change" within the agency — not a shortcut, he's careful to say, but a genuine reorientation toward enabling new reactor designs rather than force-fitting them into frameworks built for 1970s light-water technology. The ADVANCE Act and Trump's executive orders created the legislative pressure; Nieh is converting it into operational reality.
More than 100 reactor designs are now competing for commercial deployment globally. That's not a pipeline — that's a renaissance.
Meanwhile, the EIA projects U.S. power demand will climb from a record 4,195 billion kWh in 2025 to 4,379 billion kWh by 2027, driven by AI. And the DOE is reportedly considering financing billions of dollars for long-lead nuclear components — the forgings and pressure vessels that take years to procure and have historically been the quiet chokepoint killing projects before they start.
By the Numbers
- 76% — PJM wholesale power price increase, Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025
- $136.53/MWh — PJM average wholesale price, Q1 2026
- 4,379 billion kWh — EIA projected U.S. power demand, 2027
- 112 GW — global energy storage additions in 2025, up 48% year-over-year per BloombergNEF
What We're Fighting For
The price signal is real. The demand is real. The regulatory machinery is, for the first time in a generation, actually adapting. Watch FERC's response to PJM's white paper recommendations — longer-term capacity commitments could reshape how new generation gets financed. Watch whether DOE's nuclear component financing program materializes into actual loan structures. Those two decisions, made in the next 90 days, will determine whether this demand surge becomes the catalyst that finally breaks the construction logjam — or just another expensive quarter that changes nothing.
The future is electric. The bill just arrived. Now we build.