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PJM is projecting nearly 50% demand growth through the end of the 2030s.
The nation’s largest electricity market expects to be delivering a lot more power through the end of the next decade — even more than it expected last year.
PJM Interconnection, which covers some or all of 13 states (and Washington, D.C.) between Maryland and Illinois, released its latest long-term forecast last week, projecting that its summer peak demand would climb by almost half, from 155,000 megawatts in 2025 to around 230,000 in 2039.
The electricity market attributed the increased demand to “the proliferation of data centers, electrification of buildings and vehicles, and manufacturing,” and noted (not for the first time) that the demand surge comes at the same time many fossil fuel power plants are scheduled to close, especially coal plants. Already, some natural gas and even some coal plants in PJM andelsewhere that were scheduled to close have seen their retirement dates pushed out in order to handle forecast electricity demand.
This is just the latest eye-popping projection of forthcoming electricity demand from PJM and others — last year, PJM forecast summer peak demand of about 180,000 megawatts in 2035, a figure that jumped to around 220,000 megawatts in this year’s forecast.
While summer is typically when grids are most taxed due to heavy demand from air conditioning, as more of daily life gets electrified — especially home heating — winter demand is forecast to rise, too. PJM forecast that its winter peak demand would go from 139,000 megawatts in 2025, or 88% of the summer peak, to 210,000 megawatts in 2039, or 95% of its summer peak demand forecast for that year.
Systems are designed to accommodate their peak, but winter poses special challenges for grids. Namely, the electric grid can freeze, with natural gas plants and pipelines posing a special risk in cold weather — not to mention that it’s typically not a great time for solar production, either.
Aftab Khan, PJM’s executive vice president for operations, planning, and security, said in a statement Thursday that much of the recent demand increase was due to data centers growing “exponentially” in PJM’s territory.
The disparity between future demand and foreseeable available supply in the short term has already led to a colossal increase in “capacity” payments within PJM, where generators are paid to guarantee they’ll be able to deliver power in a crunch. These payments tend to favor coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants, which can produce power (hopefully) in all weather conditions whenever it’s needed, in a way that variable energy generation such as wind and solar — even when backed up by batteries — cannot as yet.
Prices at the latest capacity auction were high enough to induce Calpine, the independent power company that operates dozens of natural gas power plants and recently announced a merger with Constellation, the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, to say it would look at building new power plants in the territory.
The expected relentless increase in power demand, power capacity, and presumably, profits for power companies, was thrown into doubt, however, when the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek released a large language model that appears to require far less power than state of the art models developed by American companies such as OpenAI. While the biggest stock market victim has been the chip designer Nvidia, which has shed hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization this week, a number of power companies including Constellation and Vistra are down around 10%, after being some of the best stock market performers in 2024.
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The Department of Justice included a memo in a court filing that tears down the administration’s own case against New York’s congestion pricing.
Secretary Duffy, you have no case.
That was the gist of a memo Department of Justice lawyers sent to the Department of Transportation regarding its attempt to shut down New York City’s congestion pricing program. The letter was uploaded mistakenly on Wednesday into the court record for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lawsuit challenging Duffy’s actions. Oops.
The memo says “there is considerable litigation risk” in defending the letter Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sent on February 19, ordering the termination of New York’s program. “It is very unlikely that Judge Liman or further courts of review will uphold the Secretary’s decision on the legal grounds articulated in the letter.” The memo goes on, however, to advise the DOT of another argument it could make that may be more successful.
The Department of Transportation has since replaced the trio of DOJ lawyers that authored the memo, The New York Times reports, and plans to transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington. “Are S.D.N.Y. lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST?” an agency spokeswoman told the Times in a statement.
Dated April 11, the memo was sent to the DOT after Duffy publicly affirmed the department’s demand that New York end the program by April 20, but before the secretary upped the ante of his threats to New York as the deadline passed, announcing Monday that he would put a moratorium on any new federal approvals for transit projects in Manhattan until the state shut down the tolling program.
Duffy had given two reasons that New York’s congestion pricing program, which charges drivers $9 to enter Manhattan’s central business district, violated federal statute. First, he argued that Congress only authorized tolling programs on roads where drivers have the option to take an alternative, free route. Second, he said the state had designed the program to be a revenue raiser for the MTA, New York’s state-run transit agency, rather than a true effort to reduce congestion, and therefore the toll was not set appropriately.
But the Federal Highway Administration had spent years assessing New York’s program before approving it. “Other than the Secretary’s decision itself, there is no other material supporting or explaining the DOT’s change of position,” the DOJ memo says. There’s nothing in statute that disallows a two-fold goal of raising revenue and reducing traffic. Moreover, the lawyers note, the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn a decades-long precedent that gave agencies broad authority to interpret their statutory mandates, will hurt Duffy’s case. They also point out that Judge Liman, the district court judge who is presiding over the case, had previously ruled that the Value Pricing Pilot Program, the federal statute under which congestion pricing was approved, was designed to support these kinds of programs.
The memo warns that continuing down this route could open up both the department and Duffy personally to further probes. “The thin administrative record may lead plaintiffs to point to these ‘gaps’ in the administrative record as justification for extra-record discovery from DOT,” it says, “including requests for production of emails and depositions of agency officials, including the Secretary in particular.”
If Duffy really wants to win this case, the DOJ advises, he should instead claim he’s revoking approvals due to “changed agency priorities,” rather than saying the program violates statute. There’s precedent for using this argument to terminate “cooperative agreements” between the federal government and third parties, and Duffy could cite the same two reasons that he’s already provided. It’s not a sure thing, the memo suggests, but it’s more defensible than the current path.
New York has refused to comply with Duffy’s demands and confirmed in a court filing on Wednesday that it would not shut down the program unless and until the court tells it to.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the removal of the memo’s authors from the case.
The Esmeralda 7 project is another sign that Trump’s solar freeze is over.
The Esmeralda 7 solar project, a collection of proposed solar farms and batteries that would encompass tens of thousands of acres of federal public lands in western Nevada, appears to be moving towards the end of its federal permitting process.
The farms developed by NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and others together would add up to 6,200 megawatts of solar generation capacity, making it the largest solar project in already solar-rich Nevada.
To get a sense of the massive scale of the project, the two newly installed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are about 1,000 megawatts each and the Empire Wind offshore wind project that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered a halt to this week had a planned capacity of just over 800 megawatts.
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management updated its website for the project, indicating that the final Environmental Impact Statement for the project would be published on April 25 and the record of decision would be published on July 18.
A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told me that the Bureau wouldn’t have anything new to share until the publication of the final environmental impact statement “in the coming days or week or so.”
Still, the fact that the BLM is making progress on a decision at all is yet another sign that the “freeze” on renewables projects put in place in the early days of the Trump administration has begun to thaw, at least for solar and transmission projects.
The new decision date is also consistent with the freeze being over. A timeline presented at a BLM meeting in September envisioned the final Environmental Impact Statement being issued sometime between the fall of last year and spring of this year, with a record of decision in April. The listed July date would roughly match with the project’s permitting being delayed by two months.
The 60-day renewable permitting pause was one of Trump’s first actions in office and the offshore wind industry especially has continued to bear the brunt of the administration’s anti-renewable wrath.
But solar and transmission appear to be a different story: a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told Heatmap in March that “there is currently no freeze on processing renewable applications for solar” or for “making authorization decisions.” Earlier that month, BLM had approved a transmission line for a solar project in Southern California saying that the project would “Unleash American Energy.”
Like many large scale Nevada solar projects, the Esmeralda 7 has attracted some opposition from some area residents and conservation groups. The transmission line necessary for the project, Greenlink West, was approved in September.
For the first time, his administration targets an offshore wind project already under construction.
The Trump administration will try to stop work on Empire Wind, an offshore wind project by Equinor south of Long Island that was going through active construction, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted to X on Wednesday.
Burgum announced that he directed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to “halt all construction activities on the Empire Wind Project until further review of information that suggests the Biden administration rushed through its approval without sufficient analysis.”
A memo to the agency, which was obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, references “revelations” of “serious deficiencies” in the approval process for Empire Wind. The reported memo does not provide any further description or evidence to back this claim. When we requested comment on the Free Beacon story, an Interior spokesperson simply pointed to Burgum’s short announcement.
Equinor provided a statement to Heatmap confirming after Burgum’s announcement that it “just received a notification from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) regarding our Empire Wind 1 project, which has been in construction since 2024.”
“We will engage directly with BOEM and the Department of Interior to understand the questions raised about the permits we have received from authorities,” Equinor spokesman David Schoetz said. “We will not comment about the potential consequences until we know more.”
This is the second fully permitted offshore wind project that the Trump administration has publicly targeted and attempted to stop.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency pulled a Clean Air Act permit for Atlantic Shores, a wind farm under development off the coast of New Jersey, after anti-wind groups petitioned the agency to do so. The agency did not attempt to justify its decision other than to say that it gives the agency “the opportunity to reevaluate the Project and its environmental impacts in light of” Trump’s executive order requesting an assessment of the government’s leasing and permitting practices for wind projects.
A few days later, we were first to report that Representative Chris Smith — one of the loudest anti-wind voices in Congress — asked Burgum to halt work on Empire Wind, asserting that the environmental review process for the project was “completely inadequate.”
If Empire Wind is indeed halted, it would be the first offshore wind project under construction to be stopped by the Trump administration. Equinor disclosed in a project update that it started subsea rock installation last month, although the company’s statement to Heatmap indicates construction may have begun as early as last year. A halt to work on Empire Wind would cast a shadow over other offshore wind projects under construction, including Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia project, which we scooped could also wind up in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
Stopping Empire Wind would also mean a huge blow to New York State’s climate and clean energy goals.
After the state’s Indian Point nuclear plant closed in 2021, the population-dense metro area in and around New York City has mostly replaced that carbon-free source of energy with natural gas. Offshore wind was supposed to be a path to moving away from reliance on the fossil fuel. The state’s target of deploying 9 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035 was already going to be nearly impossible due to Trump’s pause on new leases and permits. Without the 800 megawatt Empire Wind project, New York will only have 1 gigawatt in the pipeline.
This news has already sparked an aggressive response from the American Clean Power Association, the largest renewables trade association, which released a statement pleading for the administration to “quickly address perceived inadequacies in the prior permit approvals” and that “halting construction of fully permitted energy projects is the literal opposite of an energy abundance agenda.”
“With skyrocketing energy demand and increasing consumer prices, we need streamlined permitting for all domestic energy resources,” American Clean Power CEO Jason Grumet stated. “Doubling back to reconsider permits after projects are under construction sends a chilling signal to all energy investment.”