America’s largest power grid is under enormous strain from AI data centers. And a new report details how wholesale electricity prices have jumped nearly 76% in an area where tens of millions of Americans live.
PJM Interconnection operates a wholesale electric power market in the mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and South that covers 67 million people in 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia). That’s nearly 20% of the U.S. population, and it’s also an area with a lot of data centers.
Power prices there averaged $136.53 per megawatt-hour in the first three months of 2026, according to a massive new report from Monitoring Analytics. That’s up from $77.78 per megawatt-hour in the first three months of 2026. The report isn’t shy about where we should put the blame: “Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices.”
The report, first spotted by Bloomberg, warns that there simply isn’t enough capacity to meet the demand from data centers that have been built to power the AI revolution.
“The current supply of capacity in PJM is not adequate to meet the demand from large data center loads and will not be adequate in the foreseeable future. This is a simple factual issue,” the report explains.
There’s no easy way to reverse this trend, according to Monitoring Analytics. It’s just going to be the reality for the next couple of years: “Large data center load additions have already had a significant and irreversible impact on PJM customers that will be paid through May 31, 2028, and will have additional significant impacts on other customers as a result of higher transmission costs, higher energy market prices and higher capacity market prices.”
The power mix has shifted slightly, with less dependence on coal and wind, but more on oil and solar, according to the report: “In the first three months of 2026, generation from coal units decreased 1.7 percent, generation from natural gas units increased 4.2 percent, generation from oil units increased 43.2 percent, generation from wind units decreased 4.7 percent, and generation from solar units increased 15.0 percent compared to the first three months of 2025.”
AI data centers are incredibly unpopular in the U.S., with 71% of Americans saying they oppose the construction of data centers in their area, according to a new poll from Gallup this week. Of that 71%, 23% say they’re just somewhat opposed, while 48% say they are strongly opposed.
Incredibly, more Americans say they’d rather live next to a nuclear power plant than a data center. A relatively small 53% of Americans oppose the development of nuclear power plants in their area. Among those polled, 50% cite the heavy strain on local resources, including many who are concerned about the way that data centers use electricity and drive up prices.
