As of January 16, 2026, the Trump administration and a bipartisan group of governors asked PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest wholesale electricity market, to hold a one-time emergency auction to provide data centers with new sources of power. [1] They urged PJM to do so, so that data center owners could bid on 15-year power purchase agreements, in an abrupt departure from how the grid operator normally functions. [2] The data centers would be required to pay for the new generation built for them, regardless of whether they use the power or not, according to a US Department of Energy fact sheet on the agreement. The auction could support up to $15 billion in new power plants. PJM said it will work with its stakeholders to see how the proposal aligns with a plan for handling data center interconnections that PJM’s board is set to release. The proposal cites several supporting reasons, including providing revenue certainty to new generation, protecting residential customers from capacity price increases, allocating costs to data centers, and improving load forecasting, among others.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/documents/statement-principles-regarding-pjm