Sarah: The grid finally handed us a number for what all these permit fights actually cost: sixty percent.
Sarah: If you're just joining us, PJM's capacity market was flashing red long before today.
Sarah: The auction has missed its supply target three years running, with the clearing price pinned at the $325-per-MW-day cap.
Sarah: The stress traces back to fast-rising load — AI data centers especially — and a generation pipeline that can't interconnect fast enough.
Matt: This is The Data Center Daily.
Matt: Today we're starting in New York
Matt: where 50 megawatts is the line; Texas is arguing over who pays; and Google says it has the biggest solar deal in the country.
Matt: We'll see whose PPA is actually signed.
Sarah: This one's from Bloomberg:
Quote: PJM Interconnection LLC
Quote: which serves 13 states and Washington
Quote: DC said Tuesday that its auction to procure power for the year starting June 2028 tied a $16.4 billion record set in late 2025.
Quote: Data centers accounted for roughly $6.3 billion of that total
Quote: said Joseph Bowring president of Monitoring Analytics
Quote: the grid’s independent market monitor.
Sarah: PJM's 2028 auction cleared at a record-tying $16.4 billion
Sarah: and the market monitor — Joe Bowring at Monitoring Analytics — puts $6.3 billion of that squarely on data centers.
Matt: Six-point-three billion.
Matt: Add the three auctions before it, and Bowring says data centers have loaded almost thirty billion onto PJM ratepayers.
Matt: That's the invoice landing.
Sarah: And it still fell 6.8 gigawatts short of reliability.
Sarah: Third straight auction missing the target.
Sarah: Record cost, and it still didn't buy enough power.
Matt: Bowring's fix is the part I'd underline: run a separate auction just for data centers
Matt: so the guy in Ohio who never asked for a server hall stops eating the difference.
Matt: The watchdog is saying the quiet part out loud.
Sarah: Which is notable, because vendors keep telling us efficiency solves this.
Sarah: A monitor with a thirty-billion-dollar tab isn't persuaded by performance-per-watt slides.
Sarah: From Markus Kasanmascheff at WinBuzzer:
Quote: New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed an order to halt incomplete environmental permits for new data centers using 50 megawatts or more
Quote: a cutoff aimed at facilities that can impose large water demands
Quote: for up to one year. The pause leaves already-approved developments outside its scope.
Sarah: New York's put a number on the pause: 50 megawatts and up
Sarah: incomplete permits frozen for up to a year while regulators write grid
Sarah: water air and community rules.
Sarah: It's the floor number we didn't have when Executive Order 62 dropped.
Matt: And here's why it matters: 12 gigawatts of large load was sitting in the interconnection queue as of May.
Matt: New York just told a chunk of that to stop and prove it first.
Sarah: Note what's exempt: already-approved projects and smaller institutional sites.
Sarah: The freeze hits incomplete permits only; there's no claw-back.
Sarah: The stuff in the ground keeps going.
Matt: Put it next to the 60% cost figure we just hit, and it's the other end of the same problem.
Matt: PJM prices the gap; New York slams the door on new entrants while it writes the rulebook.
Sarah: And water quality is one of the four areas they're now required to define.
Sarah: Somebody's finally going to do the two-billion-gallon arithmetic before the permit, not after.
Sarah: Mark Segal over at ESG Today has the details.
Sarah: Google's signed what ESG Today is calling the largest solar project in the US.
Sarah: And it lands the same morning PJM prints the 60% supply-cost jump we opened with.
Sarah: Google's buying itself out of the grid-cost exposure the rest of the queue is about to eat.
Matt: Largest in the US — great headline.
Matt: Is the PPA signed and power flowing, or is this contracted-someday capacity dressed up for a press cycle?
Sarah: ESG Today says signed.
Sarah: What I don't see is an in-service date or the term.
Sarah: Announced and energized are different animals.
Matt: Right — and Google self-insuring against a 60% cost bump is fine for Google.
Matt: The ratepayer in PJM territory doesn't get to sign a solar deal to opt out of that invoice.
Sarah: Here's Matt Boms at Texas Energy and Power:
Quote: The scale explains why.
Quote: ERCOT estimates up to 110 gigawatts of new large loads could seek to connect over the next five years
Quote: more than double today’s system peak of about 86 gigawatts.
Quote: Before any of that generation arrives
Quote: about $37 billion in transmission costs are already baked into the system
Quote: pushing rates up roughly 3.5 percent a year for every customer.
Matt: After that Bloomberg number — PJM supply costs up 60% — Texas is going the other direction.
Matt: The Texas Energy Buyers Alliance walked in and said, charge us.
Matt: Tie the transmission bill to our approved capacity.
Sarah: And the scale is why.
Sarah: ERCOT's modeling up to 110 gigawatts of new large-load requests over five years — the system peak today is about 86.
Sarah: You're talking more than double, before a single new generator shows up.
Matt: And there's already $37 billion in transmission baked in, pushing rates up 3.5% a year for everyone — grandma included.
Matt: The buyers group is at least saying the new demand should carry the new bill.
Sarah: One state freezes the door shut at 50 megawatts; another tries to price the door correctly.
Sarah: Same week, opposite instincts.
Sarah: I'll take the tariff over the padlock.
Matt: It's the statewide version of that Grimes County fight — write the rulebook and hand out the incentive check in the same room.
Matt: Only here, somebody actually proposed who pays.
Sarah: DataCenterNews Canada writes:
Quote: According to NVIDIA
Quote: its GB300 NVL72 rack-scale system delivers up to 25 times the performance per watt of the Hopper generation on DeepSeek V4 Pro
Quote: up to 20 times on GLM5.1 and up to 10 times on Kimi K2.6.
Quote: It attributed those gains to the move from an eight-GPU domain in Hopper systems to a 72-GPU rack-scale design in Blackwell NVL72.
Sarah: NVIDIA says its GB300 NVL72 rack does up to 25 times the performance per watt of Hopper on DeepSeek V4 Pro.
Sarah: Twenty on GLM5.1, ten on Kimi K2.6.
Sarah: Nice benchmarks. The whole pitch is 'fixed power budgets' — serve frontier models without blowing past electricity and cooling limits.
Sarah: Vendor touts power discipline the same week PJM's watchdog prints a 60% cost bump. Read the room.
Matt: Twenty-five times per watt against Hopper — sure.
Matt: But per watt of what?
Matt: A rack that pulls more total power than the eight-GPU box it replaced.
Matt: The efficiency gain doesn't shrink the interconnection request.
Matt: 'Fixed power budgets.'
Matt: Man. Somewhere a site's running turbines with no air permit and NVIDIA's out here selling discipline slides.
Matt: Put a signed PPA or an in-service date behind the number and I'll listen.
Sarah: The giveaway for me: even NVIDIA says a single figure can't capture inference trade-offs.
Sarah: Low latency versus throughput versus cost.
Sarah: So 'up to 25x' is the best-case corner; it doesn't describe the operating reality.
Host: If you follow infrastructure, you'll probably want the software side too.
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Host: Links to every story we covered today are in the show notes, so if one caught your attention, you can dig into the original reporting there.
Host: That's The Data Center Daily for today.
Host: This is a Lantern Podcast.