We Make the Power. Why Are We Paying Their Bill?
Pennsylvania doesn’t have an energy problem. It has a who-pays problem.
Start with what this state brings to the table. We’re the second-largest natural gas producer in the country and the third-largest electricity producer. We send more power across our borders than any other state, close to double the next one in line. Nuclear plants, Marcellus gas, rivers, rail, universities, and a hundred and fifty years of running heavy industry. If you were building an energy economy from scratch, you’d draw it to look a lot like this map.
Now look at your electric bill.
The grid that runs through these twelve counties is managed by PJM, and PJM buys power reserves at auction years in advance. Those auctions have been setting records. Two delivery years ago, capacity cleared at under thirty dollars a megawatt-day. The current year cleared at $329.17, the ceiling regulators allowed.
The grid’s own independent market monitor has said plainly what’s driving it. Across the last four auctions, data centers account for $29.4 billion of $63.6 billion in capacity charges. Close to half. The monitor also warned the damage keeps coming, through higher transmission costs and higher wholesale prices, landing on customers who never signed a contract with a tech company.
Those customers include a retiree in Portage, a diner in Chambersburg, a machine shop in Altoona. They’re covering a share of the cost of reserving power for server farms that, in many cases, haven’t been built. PJM itself opened a review this week to sort real projects from speculative ones, because too many of the proposals feeding those forecasts live on paper.
Meanwhile the builders who can move fast are skipping the line. Analysts at Enverus expect close to 30 gigawatts of gas generation to go up right beside new industrial sites nationwide by 2030, data centers driving nearly nine-tenths of it. Small turbines, fuel cells, engines, on site and on the developer’s dime.
That tells you something. When a data center pays for its own power, it can. It chooses to, when the grid is too slow. The question is why it gets to lean on the grid, and on your bill, whenever that’s cheaper.
The fix has been sketched. The U.S. House passed a bill 417 to 3 this month asking state regulators to make big data centers pay the full cost of the upgrades they require. Asking. States decide whether to adopt it. Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission has opened a proceeding on data center costs, and a proposal to write the data-center-pays rule into state law has been circulating in Harrisburg.
Pennsylvania makes the power, sells the power, and hosts the wires. It holds every card a state could want in this game. It should be setting the terms: build here, bring your own generation or pay your full freight, and leave the household ratepayer out of your business plan.
The compute is coming either way. The only question on the table is who picks up the tab.
Twelve counties, every day, no appointment necessary. — Silas Corvin.
Sources
- Utility Dive, “Data centers drove $6.3B in PJM capacity auction costs: market monitor” (July 20, 2026)
- Utility Dive, “PJM board proposes backstop capacity auction, data center curtailment plans” (July 2026)
- Utility Dive, “‘Clear warning signs’ as PJM wholesale power costs jump 54% in one year” (March 2026)
- PJM Inside Lines, “PJM Kicks Off Annual Process of Vetting Large Load Requests”
- Reuters via Pipeline & Gas Journal, “Dash for small gas turbines set to impact data center costs”
- Enverus Intelligence Research, “Behind-the-meter generation forecast: Skipping the queue”
- U.S. EIA, Pennsylvania State Profile
- Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office, Pennsylvania Electricity Update (Feb. 2025)
- Congress.gov, H.R. 9340, Ratepayer Protection Act
- Utility Dive, “Pennsylvania PUC to consider ratemaking, ROE and curtailment as data center load grows” (Sept. 2026)
- Pennsylvania House co-sponsorship memo, Pennsylvania Ratepayer Protection Act
