Grid Congestion, Not Gas, Drove Biggest Slice of PJM Price Spike
The independent watchdog that grades the PJM electric grid put out its half-year report card last Thursday under the cheerful headline “Market Monitor Finds PJM Wholesale Electricity Markets Competitive.” Read down three paragraphs, and you find the opposite — the capacity market flunked, three years running, and the Monitor blames data centers. Buried further still is a number that ought to end a certain argument in Harrisburg for good: the biggest single driver of PJM’s price spike wasn’t natural gas. It was the wires. Read More “Grid Congestion, Not Gas, Drove Biggest Slice of PJM Price Spike”
Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) and EQT Corporation have signed a 10-year gas supply agreement that locks up the entire fuel appetite of the CPV Shay Energy Center, the $3 billion, 2,100-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle plant headed for Doddridge County, West Virginia. It’s the deal that turns Shay from a project on paper into a project with a fuel contract. 
Something happened over the past ten days that ought to look awfully familiar to anyone who was around Marcellus country in 2009. A single advocacy shop dug a permit out of a state filing cabinet, handed it to a friendly reporter at the New York Times, and within a week roughly two dozen outlets were running the same three sentences about Amazon becoming “the largest single source of pollution in the United States.” It’s not a coincidence, it’s not organic, and it’s not staying in Texas. Big Green has told us, in print, that the data center fight is the anti-fracking playbook run a second time — and one of the projects already on their list belongs to Williams, in Ohio, burning Utica gas. 
Both federal and state regulators signed off last Thursday on PowerTransitions’ purchase of the 1,242-megawatt (MW) Roseton Generating Facility in Newburgh, New York — the sixth and by far the largest gas-fired plant the Houston-based company has grabbed in the Empire State this year. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued its order Aug. 13 (Docket EC26-95-000), and the New York Public Service Commission approved the transfer the same day. But the most interesting thing in the FERC order isn’t the approval. It’s the name of the company doing the buying. 
PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that keeps the lights on for 67 million people across 13 states including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, filed its long-awaited data center framework with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Wednesday, August 13. The short version: if you’re a new data center and you don’t bring your own electricity to the party, you get switched off first when the grid gets tight. Homes and small businesses get cut last. It’s a rule that, read correctly, is one enormous purchase order for Marcellus/Utica gas. 
Here’s a puzzle for you. The Trump EPA has spent 18 months dismantling the Biden administration’s carbon rules for power plants. The final repeal has been parked at the White House Office of Management and Budget since May 14 — and as of this writing it’s still sitting there, past the 90-day review window that ran out on August 12. Everybody in the business assumes it’s a done deal. So why are state regulators still writing those very same carbon limits into brand-new permits for brand-new gas plants — including two projects that will burn Marcellus and Utica gas? 
PJM Interconnection and Dominion Energy are reviewing a July 22 event in Northern Virginia in which roughly 3,800 megawatts (MW) of data center load — the largest such disconnection in PJM’s history — unexpectedly ripped itself off the grid after a routine, correctly cleared transmission fault, forcing PJM operators to scramble to keep the grid stable. The event has reignited a fight over whether data centers, which are growing explosively across the PJM footprint (including Marcellus/Utica territory), need to be held to new “ride through” standards so they stop treating minor grid hiccups like five-alarm fires. 
Babcock & Wilcox — the 159-year-old boiler maker headquartered in Akron, Ohio — announced yesterday that it signed an agreement with Siemens Energy to start work on 20 steam turbine generator sets totaling 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity for gas-fired data center projects. Here’s the part that caught our eye: B&W hasn’t announced signed customers for all of them. The company is buying the factory slots first and lining up buyers second. That’s a real bet on gas-fired power demand — and it’s being made by a company sitting right on top of the Utica. 
A Nasdaq-listed company you’ve almost certainly never heard of says it has signed a binding term sheet to buy roughly 1,800 acres of unleased Marcellus mineral rights in “northern Pennsylvania,” drill a dozen wells on it, burn the gas in on-site turbines, and run a 200-megawatt AI data center behind the meter — with a stretch goal of 1 gigawatt. The company, Alpha Compute Corp. (Nasdaq: ALP), never says which county. We think we’ve figured it out: Tioga County. Here’s what’s actually known, what we deduced, and what nobody should be printing as fact yet. 
Rochester, NY-based Energy Concepts has unveiled a modular natural gas power system called “Plato5X” that lets AI data centers generate their own electricity, make their own water, cool themselves, and capture 90% of their carbon emissions — without touching the local power grid or municipal water supply. Each 5-megawatt module runs on natural gas and is aimed squarely at the exploding AI/data center market, which is straining power grids and water systems across the country (
Duke Energy reported second quarter 2026 results Tuesday, and while the earnings themselves are fine-but-boring utility fare, buried in the slide deck is one of the better demand stories going for Marcellus/Utica producers: Duke now has 6,025 megawatts (MW) of new gas-fired generation sited in North and South Carolina, every announced plant has its gas supply under contract, and the two pipelines that will carry most of those molecules south both trace back to Appalachia. 
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) posted its third-quarter fiscal 2026 results yesterday (Aug. 4) — a press release, an investor presentation, and a 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The headline numbers are fine but boring: $10 billion in revenue over nine months, net income of $965 million, up $220 million from last year. Yawn. However, if you dig into the 10-Q, there’s real news for Marcellus/Utica producers. TVA’s giant new Cumberland gas plant has fired up for the first time. TVA borrowed $2 billion to pay for it — the largest such financing in the agency’s history. And TVA has quietly expanded its natural gas hedge book to nearly 1 trillion cubic feet. Let’s dig in. 
On July 30, French environmental services giant Veolia announced it had been picked by “a major project developer” to operate and maintain a 350-megawatt (MW) microgrid that will power an artificial intelligence data center campus in Ohio. The press release carried a New Albany, Ohio dateline. It’s a genuinely big deal — a behind-the-meter power plant that will supply 100% of a data center campus without leaning on the grid at all. Here’s the dots nobody else has connected. This is the same Veolia that Antero Resources and Antero Midstream spent six years suing over a botched frack wastewater plant in West Virginia. And Veolia announced this shiny new Ohio contract exactly six days after wiring Antero a check for $371 million. You can’t make this stuff up.