On July 30, 2024, PJM Interconnection — the largest U.S. wholesale electricity market, covering all or part of 13 states across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest plus DC — completed its annual capacity auction for the 2025/2026 delivery year.

Capacity prices cleared at $269.92 per megawatt-day for the broader RTO — roughly 9x the prior year's auction clearing price of $28.92/MW-day.

In the Dominion zone (covering most of Virginia), prices cleared at the same level. The cause was not unusual weather, generation outages, or fuel-price volatility. The cause was projected demand growth — primarily from data centers serving cloud computing and AI training workloads concentrated in northern Virginia (the so-called 'Data Center Alley' around Loudoun and Prince William counties) — that pushed PJM's capacity-supply position into a tightness that the auction price reflected.

The 9x year-over-year jump was the largest single move in PJM capacity-market history per available auction records.