PJM Makes Data Centers Bend

The largest power market in the United States has spent the better part of two years trying to reconcile an immovable object with an unstoppable force. The immovable object is a transmission grid whose ability to add firm generation is constrained by long interconnection queues, supply-chain delays, and the slow arithmetic of building large machines. The unstoppable force is the artificial-intelligence build-out, which has made data centers the fastest-growing category of electricity demand the country has seen in a generation.