PJM's Wholesale Power Prices Are Set to Jump 41% This Year. Its Own Market Monitor Puts Data Centers at Less Than a Tenth of the Bill.

Forty one percent. That is how much the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects wholesale electricity prices to climb this year in PJM, the grid that stretches from Chicago to Washington D.C. and keeps the lights on for roughly 65 million people across 13 states. No other region the agency tracks is close. The national average wholesale price is forecast to rise just 11%, to $52 per megawatt hour, and prices in the Pacific Northwest's Mid-Columbia hub are actually expected to fall 23%. PJM is the outlier, and the AI buildout sitting inside its territory is getting most of the credit, or the blame, depending on who is paying the bill.

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What Changed

The EIA's October Short-Term Energy Outlook, released this month, singles out PJM as the one region where 2026 is turning out meaningfully more expensive than 2025. Electricity consumption across the country rose 4% in the third quarter versus a year earlier, led by residential and commercial demand during a summer of record heat, and the agency's own language attributes most of the broader national increase to weather in a handful of regions rather than to any single structural cause. That framing matters, because PJM has become ground zero for a different story: more data centers connecting to the grid than any operator anticipated even two years ago.

PJM's own numbers complicate the simple version of that story. Monitoring Analytics, the market's independent monitor, found that total wholesale costs across the first seven months of 2026 rose 46% to $116.53 per megawatt hour, worth about $56.7 billion, from $79.57 per megawatt hour a year earlier. Existing and forecast data center load, in the monitor's accounting, explains $10.48 of that $116.53 figure, or roughly 9%. Average peak demand across the footprint rose a comparatively modest 1.7%, and real-time hourly load was up 2.2%. The AI buildout is real and it is adding cost, but on PJM's own math it is a minority contributor to a bill that's risen for several reasons at once.

Why It Matters

The nuance doesn't make the dollar figures any smaller for the people and businesses paying PJM rates, and it doesn't change where the growth is concentrated going forward. Data center load growth has added a combined $29.4 billion in capacity market revenue across PJM's last four capacity auctions, a number that keeps compounding as more AI campuses request interconnection. That demand is flowing straight into the order books of the companies that build and wire the grid. Quanta Services posted second-quarter revenue of $9.56 billion, up 41.1% from a year earlier, with its electric infrastructure unit doing about 82% of that work and its operating margin climbing to 11.5%. The company's backlog hit a record $53.44 billion, up roughly 49% from $35.84 billion a year ago, and its stock has gone from $574.80 in late July to $690.30 by early October, a gain of nearly 64% for the year. GE Vernova is sitting on a $176 billion backlog of its own, and Eaton's electrical equipment backlog grew 43%, financed in part by long-term debt that rose from $8.8 billion at the end of 2025 to $18.5 billion after a run of acquisitions.

The stranger pattern is on the utility side, where the companies that actually generate and sell the power haven't traded like beneficiaries of an AI supercycle. Constellation Energy, which inked a $4.3 billion nuclear uprate deal with Google just days after Amazon locked up a similar arrangement, is still down almost 16% for the year, even though the Google agreement also included a separate 15-year deal for another 2,700 megawatts from its existing PJM fleet, signed the same week. NRG Energy, which is developing a 1.2-gigawatt gas plant in Texas for a hyperscale customer, has fallen more than 32% year to date. Vistra is roughly flat, down 1.8%, even though its East segment adjusted earnings rose to $642 million from $418 million. Investors appear to be pricing in the cost and execution risk of building new generation faster than the revenue certainty from locking in a hyperscaler contract. Quanta's chief executive, Duke Austin, put the bottleneck plainly on the company's earnings call: "I'm not sure people understand how difficult it is to interconnect the grid." His team also notes it takes roughly four years to train a single craft worker, a constraint that technology and capital alone can't shortcut.

What to Watch Next

PJM's next capacity auction will be the clearest test of whether the 41% price path holds or steepens further, since each of the last four auctions has layered on more data center-linked revenue than the one before it. Watch too for how electricity costs show up in the inflation data the Federal Reserve is parsing ahead of its October 27-28 meeting. The central bank raised rates to a target range of 3.75% to 4.00% in September specifically because officials weren't satisfied inflation was cooling, and a regional utility bill that rises 41% in one of the country's most populous grid footprints is exactly the kind of sticky, hard-to-reverse cost that keeps policymakers cautious. If other regions start resembling PJM instead of Mid-Columbia, the "it's mostly weather" explanation gets harder to lean on next year.

The Pulse24 Take

The easy headline, AI data centers are driving your electric bill up 41%, isn't quite what PJM's own market monitor found when it did the accounting, and the EIA's own emphasis on weather makes the popular version of this story look oversimplified. But easy headlines are usually wrong in the details, not the direction. Data centers are the fastest-growing, least-finished piece of PJM's demand picture, the piece with the longest runway, and the one capital markets are already pricing as a decade-long build rather than a one-year blip. The 9% data centers account for today is a floor, not a ceiling, and the infrastructure stocks understand that better than the utility stocks do.