Exelon asks FERC to delay PJM's 2030/31 capacity auction to 2030 as load forecasts hit 21.7%

Exelon asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on November 3 to change when PJM, the grid operator for the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, buys its power ¹². The complaint, docket EL27-11↗, would replace an auction held three years before delivery with a prompt one two months out, starting with the 2030/31 delivery year now scheduled for May 2027 ¹².

Exelon's▲+0.67% — Exelon, up 0.67 percent today six utilities serve about 10.7 million customers in PJM, and since separating its power plants with Constellation in 2022 it buys capacity rather than sells it ³⁴. What broke, on Exelon's telling, is demand: large loads such as data centers now arrive on schedules no three-year forecast can track ¹⁵.

The three-year forecast no longer describes the grid it prices

The gap was set in a 2006 settlement↗, when a new plant took 33 months to build and load forecasts held steady ². Both halves of that bargain have gone. Load adjustments in PJM's 2026 forecast reach 21.7 percent of summer peak four to five years out ². In forecasts from 2017 through 2021 they never exceeded 2 percent ².

Gas turbines now book five years ahead, and about 24 gigawatts of planned plants have abandoned signed interconnection agreements since 2020 without ever running ². The last two auctions cleared at the $325 per MW-day cap federal regulators set, and still left the region short of its reliability requirement ².

PJM's own May white paper, quoted in the complaint, says the design's foundational assumption "has been physically broken" ². Exelon says later auctions will run with no cap at all ².

The squeeze is already on Exelon's books

Third-quarter revenue rose 9 percent ⁴. Operating income fell 8 percent, the first year-over-year decline in eight quarters ⁶. The difference is regulatory. In August, Maryland's Public Service Commission awarded Pepco, Exelon's Washington-area utility, a $51 million rate increase ⁴. Pepco had asked for $120 million ⁴. The order also disallowed $180 million of plant↗, which Exelon wrote straight into operating and maintenance expense, and that write-off with heavier storm costs drove the 33 percent jump in operating and maintenance expense ⁴.

Adjusted earnings, which exclude the write-off, held at $0.87 a share ⁹. The same bill pressure that sent Exelon to FERC is already making state regulators take money back.

PJM is not on Exelon's clock

PJM answered the next day, opposing fast-track handling and asking to move its reply from November 23 to December 21 ². Its board meets November 17 on the very auction at issue, and a separate stakeholder reform effort with more than 30 proposals convened November 13 ²³. Chief executive Calvin Butler put the physical stakes on record on November 9: last winter the Mid-Atlantic came within 15 minutes of curtailing power, with 400,000 customers exposed ⁸.

The clock is not the bottleneck; steel is

Exelon says so itself: a prompt auction alone will not solve affordability, and PJM urgently needs more generation ⁷. That is where the AI buildout now binds. FERC can change who pays for a wrong forecast; only new megawatts change what there is to buy. The value in this chain belongs to whoever delivers generation, wires and storage into PJM, not to anyone's four-year forecast.