President Donald Trump gestures before boarding Air Force One bound for Detroit, Michigan, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, January 13, 2026.
Evelyn HochsteinReuter
The Trump administration on Friday plans to push the nation’s largest power grid to force big technology companies to pay for new power plants.
Electricity prices on the PJM interconnection have exploded in recent years, largely due to the data centers that technology companies are building to train and power artificial intelligence.
PJM Grid serves more than 65 million people in 13 states and Washington, DC. Its service area includes Northern Virginia, the world’s largest data center market.
President Donald Trump is asking PJM to hold an emergency auction for tech companies to bid on new power contracts, a White House official told CNBC.
The official said President Trump is asking PJM to build $15 billion in new baseload power generation. The official also said he wants PJM to put a cap on how much existing power plants can charge on the grid’s capacity market to protect ratepayers.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Mid-Atlantic governors are expected to announce an agreement Friday morning urging PJM to take these steps, the official said.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the administration is leading an unprecedented bipartisan effort to urge PJM to correct past energy subtraction failures, prevent price increases, and reduce the risk of blackouts,” White House Press Secretary Taylor Rogers said in a statement.
Bloomberg first reported the news.
Despite President Trump’s promise to lower energy prices during his presidential campaign, utility bills are rising in many parts of the United States. The issue played a major role in the landslide victories of Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger in the gubernatorial races of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively.
The cost of securing PJM’s power capacity has exploded in recent years, with data centers attributable to $23 billion, according to watchdog Monitoring Analytics. Those costs are passed on to consumers. This amounted to a “huge wealth transfer,” the watchdog told PJM in a November letter.
PJM fell 6 gigawatts short of its 2027 reliability requirements in a recent auction. 6 gigawatts is equivalent to six large nuclear power plants.
Abe Silverman, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who served as general counsel for the New Jersey Public Utilities Commission from 2019 to 2023 under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, said power shortages make blackouts more likely.
“Instead of a power outage that happens once every 10 years, we think we’re going to have something that happens more frequently,” Silverman said.
