July was defined by extreme heat and record load. In August, PJM moved the action off the grid and into the regulatory process. PJM put three major filings in front of FERC in as many weeks, published a review of the largest data center load-loss event in its history, and released a 5-year strategy conceding that the era of flat load growth is over.

The PJM market was relatively tame through August as weather came in seasonable, but all five of this summer’s current coincident peaks appeared in July. PJM issued a Hot Weather Alert for August 9-11 — the only operational alert of the month — a sharp contrast to July's peak of roughly 168,158 MW and $1,222.75 per megawatt-hour (MWh) West Hub print on July 2. The near-term weather premium has largely come out of the front of the curve as attention shifts to winter, with forecasts pointing to milder conditions due to a strengthening El Niño.

PJM's July 31 RBP filing (Docket ER26-3380-000) is still pending at FERC. It is a one-time procurement covering the 6,831.3 MW of unforced capacity by which the 2028/2029 Base Residual Auction cleared short.

• FERC approval requested by September 29; procurement opens September 30 and runs through October 21, with results by early December.

• Commitments run up to 15 years and are open to new generation, storage, demand response, and distributed energy resources that can be online by June 1, 2032.

• The MW-weighted average levelized cost of selected offers is capped at $555/MW-day — essentially what the market signaled on its own. PJM's 2028/2029 auction report shows the regional transmission organization (RTO) would have cleared at $554.72/MW-day without the price collar.

• Remaining costs flow through PJM to load-serving entities, with states deciding how they’re assigned at retail, including to data centers.

That last point is where the real fight is. State commissions will decide over the coming months whether all customers share these costs or whether they’re isolated to data centers.

PJM's second, broader package (Docket ER26-3515-000) implements the remaining directives from its July 27 Board letter. Comments were due September 3; PJM requested an October 12 effective date.

Interim Resource Adequacy Service (IRAS) — previously known as "Connect and Manage" — would allow large data centers to enter service without first securing capacity to cover their demand, but the share of demand left uncovered would become available for reduction ahead of existing Pre-Emergency Load Management. In plain terms, PJM would curtail these uncovered Large Loads first before calling on the demand response programs that existing customers participate in today. A "Large Load" is defined as demand with a cumulative peak of at least 50 MW at a single electrical site, applying to loads entering service after June 1, 2027. PJM stresses that an IRAS obligation does not mean routine curtailment — it establishes a reliability resource called on only when real-time conditions warrant.

The package also creates two new mechanisms. The first is a Large Load Registry, tracking location, in-service dates, peak demand, and backup generation across the footprint. The second is Bring Your Own New Capacity (BYONC), which lets a Large Load customer reduce its IRAS exposure by bringing qualifying new capacity to the system. That capacity must offer into PJM's capacity auctions as price takers for 10 consecutive delivery years. PJM says this intentional high bar is meant to ensure supply is "new and not repackaged."

Most relevant to existing customers: beginning with the 2029/2030 delivery year, PJM would exclude uncovered incremental Large Load demand from the capacity auction demand curve until that load has BYONC or an RBP allocation. PJM's rationale is direct — "the rest of PJM's load should not be exposed to the price impacts" of new Large Loads buying capacity through the regular auction instead of bringing new supply. If it holds, it will ease some of the upward pressure on capacity charges for everyone else.

Most of this year's commentary has framed data centers as a demand problem. An event reviewed in August shows they are also an operational one.

On July 22, a 230-kilovolt transmission line outage in Northern Virginia caused roughly 3,800 MW of data center load to disconnect and transfer to backup generation — the largest such event in PJM history. PJM-wide load dropped from 99,984 MW to 96,205 MW, producing significant voltage and frequency swings. PJM and Dominion published a joint review on August 11, and PJM is now evaluating new interconnection reliability requirements, including ride-through standards for large computational loads. This is the fourth Large Load workstream alongside RBP, IRAS, and the interconnection queue, and is likely to produce tariff changes.

Following its July 23 technical conference, FERC issued an August 10 notice initiating a dispute-resolution process directing PJM to prepare governance reforms. PJM filed a term sheet August 21 proposing to expand its Section 205 filing rights, convert stakeholder voting from binding to advisory, extend Board terms from 3 years to 9, and grant the Organization of PJM States filing rights on certain resource adequacy matters. FERC mediators convened stakeholders September 1, with a package expected at the September 24 Members Committee.

These reforms would shift real authority toward the Board and the states while signaling that market rule changes will arrive faster moving forward, in both directions.

The supply backdrop remains more than adequate. U.S. natural gas storage inventories entered the 2026 injection season at 1.828 Tcf, nearly identical to the 5-year average of 1.815 Tcf. Since then, strong injections have pushed inventories significantly higher. As of late August, total working gas in storage stands at 3.184 Tcf, or 167 Bcf above the 5-year average. Looking ahead, analysts currently project end-of-season storage inventories to peak near 3.925 Tcf, a level widely viewed as comfortable and sufficient to meet typical winter demand requirements.