Power-sector executives said political pressure—not technical reality—is currently driving the debate over PJM Interconnection’s rising electricity prices, warning that the region’s policymaking could still shift dramatically following the 2026 election cycle.

Speaking at the PTC ’26 conference in Honolulu, panelists said the 13-governor letter urging PJM to accelerate new generation development is unlikely to produce immediate structural changes, even as national headlines portray a grid in crisis.

Allan Schurr, chief commercial officer of Enchanted Rock, said the governors’ request offers “political cover” during an election year as consumers absorb steep rate increases. “I think it’s more smoke than fire,” Schurr said. “It was a political statement, not really with any enforcement mechanism.” He added that “this is a midterm election year,” and suggested that actual policy outcomes could shift depending on how states and the federal government recalibrate the balance between reliability and affordability.

Schurr said the letter reflects frustration with PJM’s capacity market, where prices have soared in recent auctions. But he noted that the energy companies actually eager to build new generation under a proposed 15-year revenue framework are those traditionally barred from participating in the market design: American Electric Power, Exelon, PPL, and others with regulated-utility business models. “They want to build more generators,” he said, adding that a longer-term capacity signal could shift the landscape.

He also warned that the cost of meeting rising demand will escalate sharply because “there’s no Moore’s law of electricity.” Serving the last megawatt of load can be extraordinarily expensive, he said—especially when those marginal additions arrive not as a few megawatts but “in blocks of hundreds or even thousands” due to surging data-center development.

A fact sheet released last week by the Department of Energy outlined a Trump administration plan to accelerate construction of large baseload power plants in the Mid-Atlantic, arguing that the region’s reliance on intermittent resources has raised costs and undermined grid reliability. A companion National Energy Dominance Council statement detailed a governors’ agreement to support more than USD 15bn in new generation, funded in part by major technology companies.

Even so, PJM released a large-load addition plan in response to the political pressure.

Against that policy backdrop, panelists stressed that data centers face a two-fold challenge when working with utilities: energy infrastructure and energy supply. Shelley McCain, vice president of energy strategy at Aligned Data Centers, said developers today must finance not only grid upgrades but also the underlying energy mix required to serve new load. “That’s a fair statement,” she said, noting the growing expectation that data centers bring both transmission upgrades and generation solutions to the table. Schurr agreed, adding that onsite generation is increasingly becoming the only viable way to address opportunity cost while waiting years for PJM interconnections.

David Bell, vice president of data centers and microgrids at VoltaGrid, expanded the critique, arguing that the grid is unprepared for a future defined by bidirectional power flows and machine-learning-driven load volatility.

He said aging infrastructure and unpredictable GPU workloads are stressing systems not designed to manage rapid oscillations. “The grid is old and antiquated and never built to do what we’re asking it to do today,” he said. “And that should not be socialized at all.”