PJM board letter Jul 27 / CIFP dead none of 11 concepts 2/3 / backstop auction ER26-3380 $555/MW-day 15-yr / IRAS ER26-3515 filed Aug 13 / new ≥50 MW loads post-Jun-2027 without new capacity curtailed FIRST / excluded from RPM 2029/30 / Large Load Registry / Swett 'grave legitimacy crisis' Sept ultimatum / EL26-67 abeyance / ~70 GW new load by 2038 vs 15 GW retired

The stakeholder process failed first: none of the 11 'Immediate Resource Adequacy Solutions' concepts reached two-thirds support, so on July 27 the Board of Managers (Chair Paula Conboy) simply decided. Four planks. (1) Reliability Backstop Procurement — a one-time auction this fall (filed at FERC July 31 as ER26-3380; results targeted by early December) to buy back the 6,831 MW shortfall, with a $555/MW-day offer cap and commitment terms up to 15 years, the target reduced by whatever bilateral self-supply shows up first. (2) Interim Resource Adequacy Service, filed August 13 as ER26-3515: 'New Large Loads' — ≥50 MW at a site or within a 1-mile radius — that energize after June 1, 2027 without bringing new qualifying capacity face curtailment BEFORE Pre-Emergency Load Management deploys. Bring your own generation or you are the grid's first shock absorber. (3) Starting with the 2029/30 BRA, incremental new large load beyond forecast that hasn't secured its own supply is excluded from the capacity auction entirely, so existing ratepayers stop funding it. (4) A mandatory Large Load Registry. The load-bearing sentence: 'Existing consumers should not bear higher capacity costs caused by new large loads that do not bring…the new supply necessary to serve them.' NRDC — not an industry ally — called the BYO-power plank 'the single best thing they could have done to stabilize the grid.' Scale context: PJM forecasts ~70 GW of new large-load demand by 2038; ~15 GW of generation has retired since 2022; Cycle 1 of the interconnection queue held 829 applications totaling ~212,000 MW as of May 15. Meanwhile FERC opened a second front. At the July 23 commission-led technical conference on PJM governance — all five commissioners presiding — Chair Laura Swett said 'PJM is facing a grave legitimacy crisis' and gave it until end of September to adopt reforms (board independence, expanded Section 205 filing rights, state involvement, streamlined stakeholder process) or have them imposed. An ADR forum with stakeholders starts September 1; post-conference comments are due August 21. And on the parallel Section 206 large-load show-cause docket (EL26-67), PJM and its transmission owners moved July 28 to hold the proceeding in abeyance for 90 days — every other RTO asked for the same ~3 months — with substantive answers nominally due today, August 17, and no FERC ruling on the extensions located as of this writing.

Primary source · PJM Board of Managers decisional letter (Jul 27 2026, pjm.com) + Data Center Knowledge — PJM's New Deal for Data Centers: Bring Power or Face Cuts (ER26-3515) + Utility Dive — FERC PJM governance reforms technical conference ↗