Datacenters slurping up so much juice they boosted prices 75% in largest US energy market

Prices in the United States' largest wholesale power market have nearly doubled in the past year thanks to demand from datacenters. And an independent watchdog predicts things will only get worse without some serious changes.

The PJM Interconnection serves all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia in the eastern US, including Northern Virginia, that’s got the densest cluster of datacenters in the world. The surge in wholesale power costs across PJM was outlined on Thursday by Monitoring Analytics, a firm that serves as the official market monitor for the Interconnection, in its Q1 2026 state of the market report.

According to the report, the total cost per megawatt-hour (MWh) of wholesale power rose from $77.78 in the first three months of 2025 to $136.53 in the same period this year, an increase of 75.5 percent year over year. Monitoring Analytics didn’t ...