Related reading on Electron Economics: PJM’s CIFP decision, the July 22 3.1 GW load transfer, and FERC didn’t settle who pays for the AI grid.
6,831 MW. That is the gap between what PJM needed for the 2028/2029 delivery year and what its July 2026 base auction actually cleared, at a price that hit the $325/MW-day cap across the entire footprint. On July 31, 2026, PJM filed a fix at FERC under Docket ER26-3380-000: a one-time Reliability Backstop Procurement, with a central bid window running September 30 to October 21 and results due by December 2, before the next base auction opens. The consensus read is that PJM is buying its way out of a hole. Read the filing and it looks like something else: a sorting machine that splits new supply into a track the strongest balance sheets contract privately, and a residual everyone else pays for.
The backstop has two doors. Door one is a bilateral matching process that PJM opened in August 2026, where data centers and other large loads negotiate capacity contracts directly with new supply projects. Qualifying bilateral and self-supply commitments shrink the central target before the auction runs. Door two is the auction itself, with a volume-weighted maximum willingness to pay of $555/MW-day in UCAP terms, fixed commitments as long as 15 years, and a commercial-operation deadline of June 1, 2032. Whatever the bilateral track does not place is what the auction has to buy.
