Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

North American wholesale power markets settled into a quiet late-October shoulder-season pattern during the week of October 24-30, with mild, well-supplied conditions across the continent and no system-wide emergencies, demand records, or sustained scarcity events reported in any footprint. Day-ahead on-peak prices for the October 28 trade date reflected that calm, clearing in the roughly $42 to $70 per megawatt-hour range in the eastern organized markets and near $25 to $55 across the West and Northeast, with the sharpest news flow coming from regulatory and governance matters rather than operations. The one consistent operational thread was the continued normalization of load and price after the extreme-heat and maintenance-driven volatility that had gripped PJM and MISO earlier in October, which by this window had receded entirely.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/103026_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

 

For nearly a decade, the United States has not been able to build high-voltage transmission fast enough to carry the power it plans to generate and consume. This week, Washington moved to do something structural about it. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, a sweeping permitting package introduced at the end of September by a bipartisan group of four senators, is heading toward a procedural vote on November 9, when the Senate returns from the midterm recess. Energy lawyers and grid strategists already describe its transmission title as the most consequential attempt at transmission permitting reform since the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It is a serious federal intervention in a wires business now constrained less by capital or demand than by the legal difficulty of connecting new resources.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/inside-the-senates-transmission-permitting-overhaul/

 

In an October 2026 study, Boston Consulting Group asked 645 CEOs whether their employees trust leadership. Nearly 90% said yes. Among 500 employees asked the same question, only 46% agreed.

A gap that wide means CEOs and employees are seeing two different companies. If you manage people, you are standing in the middle.

Trust in leadership has been sliding for some time, and the 2026 data makes it hard to ignore. Glassdoor's average senior leadership rating fell below 3.5 in April 2026, its lowest monthly level since 2017. In May, Gallup found that only about one in five U.S. employees strongly trust their organization's leadership. In March, a FranklinCovey study put trust in direct leaders at 43%.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/the-trust-recession-leading-through-forever-layoffs/

 

North American wholesale power markets passed a quiet operational week, with mild shoulder-season conditions prevailing across every region and no heat event, cold snap, or scarcity pricing of note in any footprint. Real-time prices were soft and unremarkable from Texas to the Northeast, and the Western heat spell that had briefly lifted prices earlier in October had fully receded by the reporting period. With the grid itself calm, attention turned almost entirely to policy, and the dominant storyline of the week was the accelerating reckoning over large loads and data centers. FERC convened a high-profile technical conference on reliability and large loads on October 21, and the fallout from the Commission's recent rejection of PJM's interim large-load service plan rippled through consumer advocacy, state politics, and even presidential commentary, while New York and New England grid operators struggled to win stakeholder consensus on their own large-load interconnection frameworks.

To read the full Report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/102326_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

 

American Electric Power announced on October 14 that it would invest roughly $4 billion in a 702-megawatt fuel cell facility near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and sell the output to Google under a 20-year power purchase agreement. The project reflects a growing problem for the U.S. power sector: data centers need electricity sooner than utilities can expand generation and transmission. Large electricity buyers are turning to on-site generation to reduce their dependence on grid construction schedules. Fuel cells, previously associated with smaller installations, backup power, and corporate sustainability programs, are now being considered for much larger loads. AEP's investment brings utility ownership to this approach, placing generation near the customer while grid development catches up.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/aeps-4-billion-fuel-cell-bet-on-data-centers/

 

The arrival of artificial intelligence data centers has turned large-load interconnection into one of the most pressing problems in the North American power sector. Requests for new service now exceed the physical capacity of many systems, and the conventional answer of building generation and transmission first takes far longer than a data center takes to construct. This paper examines flexible large loads as a near-term response: arrangements in which data centers and other large consumers accept curtailment or shift a portion of demand during peak and emergency conditions in exchange for faster and less costly connection. It reviews the evidence that data center demand flexibility can unlock tens of gigawatts of headroom, the technical enablers that make a flexible data center possible, the tariff and contract structures emerging for curtailable interconnection, the reliability and measurement challenges that remain unresolved, and the role of load flexibility on the grid in deferring build-out and supporting resource adequacy.

To read the full whitepaper:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Vedeni_Energy_Flexible_Large_Loads_White_Paper_3-copy.pdf

 

By late October, review meetings are filling calendars while the forms are still half finished. The task is familiar: summarize twelve months of someone's work in a few paragraphs, assign a rating, defend it in calibration, and then explain it in a conversation that is supposed to motivate the employee.

A polished review still has to give the employee something useful. Research has questioned the value of performance reviews for years; AI-assisted drafting now adds a question about whether better wording improves the conversation. Leaders overseeing the process need to examine both the assessment and how it is prepared.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/make-year-end-reviews-worth-the-effort/

 

North American wholesale power markets were defined this week by a brief but genuine reliability scare in the East rather than by the calendar. Unseasonable mid-October warmth collided with the year's heaviest autumn generator maintenance to produce the week's pivotal day on October 13. In PJM, roughly 46 GW of planned and about 60 GW of total generation sat offline, pushing effective load to approximately 167 GW even as actual demand peaked near only 108 GW; real-time prices at the Western Hub briefly topped about $1,500/MWh, and the U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order allowing units to run past environmental limits through October 16. MISO declared Conservative Operations the same day, set a record effective load near 135 GW and saw Indiana Hub prices around $1,000/MWh, which limited the help it could send a more stressed PJM. The contrast elsewhere was stark: ERCOT ran mild and wind-rich to the point of curtailment, while CAISO managed wildfire-driven public-safety power shutoffs rather than load, underscoring how localized this strain was.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/101626_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf