PJM / capacity procurement

Why it matters

This is a hard deadline that lands today and the RFI participant set is exactly the audience Cliff's PJM-side wedge would target — large-load participants and hyperscalers responding to PJM with how they want bilateral contracting structured for the September–March window. The RFI responses are not public-by-default but will surface in the FERC filing PJM makes once the design is finalized; worth watching the docket for the response set as it appears. Three structural points to pull into pjm-er26-1088-co-location.md and the broader PJM regulatory page: (1) the 14.9 GW figure is sized for the near-term subset of the 50–60 GW projected shortfall, not the full shortfall — meaning the 'backstop' framing is a deliberate hedge against the central-procurement-as-default outcome FirstEnergy is already opposing, (2) the bilateral phase being September-through-March is the same six-month window where ERCOT's Batch Zero LPC declarations are due (July 24) and the OH/PA/WV/MD local-moratorium calendar is most active — i.e., PJM's bilateral-contracting season runs straight through the worst of the local-opposition cycle, (3) the central-procurement Phase 2 in March 2027 is the residual mechanism that would aggregate any unfilled bilateral demand into a PJM-administered auction, structurally similar to ERCOT's Batch Zero allocation but with a single-shot true-up rather than rolling. Cliff's de-rate calculator and PJM-side underwriting math should treat the bilateral / central split as a regulatory bifurcation: bilateral-phase pricing is negotiated, central-phase pricing is auction-clearing — and a hyperscaler that fails to lock in a bilateral contract by March 2027 effectively pays whatever the central auction clears at, which is the Cliff-relevant tail-risk.