What’s moving the
markets now.

The demand side of the power story shifted this week from adding load to vetting it. Gov. Abbott ordered an audit of every data center in ERCOT's interconnection queue, which now tops 474 GW, more than five times the state's record peak, with roughly 90% of the requests tied to data centers. ERCOT is delaying its Batch Zero study and asking the PUCT for a timeline exemption. Bloomberg NEF figures the pause puts about 49.8 GW, some 20% of the US project pipeline, at delay risk, with up to $8 billion of data center revenue on the line by early 2027. Even Vistra is backing the pause and pushing ERCOT to cull the queue.

For suppliers, weeding speculative load out before it hits the grid takes air out of the runaway demand forecasts and protects headroom, which is a bearish pull on the peak prices you pay. PJM is telling the same story from the other side: it trimmed its ComEd zone load forecast by 1.3 GW in 2031 and 3.3 GW in 2034 on a smaller data center pipeline, and PSEG is now matching generation to large loads through PJM's bilateral process. The real projects still point to a much bigger grid down the road, so this is a near-term easing, not a reversal. But for now the direction on cleared demand is down.

Gas keeps winning the buildout, and it is showing up in the queues, not just the forecasts. Natural gas led the first cycle of PJM's new first-ready, first-served process at 99.8 GW across 147 projects, nearly half of the 201.5 GW that qualified, a sharp flip from three years ago when 90% of the queue was solar, wind and storage. PPL's Blackstone venture, Invitium, reserved more than 5 GW of combined-cycle turbines for Pennsylvania data centers on sites that could hold 14 GW. Add NRG's 1.2 GW customer-backed Texas plant (with an option to double to 2.4 GW) and Southern's contracted large load climbing to 17 GW, mostly gas, and you have block after block of new gas-fired demand getting locked in across PJM, ERCOT, and the Southeast.

The caveat gas marketers know: most queue projects never get built, and turbines and permitting are the real bottleneck, not molecules. But the near-term balance is tightening anyway. EIA's 33 Bcf injection for the week ended July 31 pushed Lower 48 stocks to 3,117 Bcf, still about 6% above the five-year average but running under the normal seasonal pace as heat kept power burn high. Another lean build trims the surplus and keeps a floor under the front. Net, the direction of travel on the price you pay is up.

The counterweight to the bullish gas signal is flexibility, and it is compounding fast enough to matter for how peaks price. EIA says utility-scale battery capacity grew about 70% a year over the last three years, reaching 43.6 GW at the end of 2025 and nearly 52 GW by mid-2026, with another 14 GW due by year end. Batteries soak up cheap midday power and dump it back into the peak, which is exactly when prices spike. Every gigawatt added is more headroom shaving the top off peak prices.

The policy and behind-the-meter tailwinds are building too. Data center developers had about 56 GW of on-site generation planned as of early 2026, roughly 30% of all planned builds, led by Texas at 20.6 GW behind the meter, with Sunrun, Tesla and Renew Home pushing a 16 GW VPP and a Brattle study pegging demand-flexibility potential at up to 200 GW. Sen. Welch's STRONG GRID Act would put $700 million behind microgrids, VPPs, and DER, and New Jersey is standing up a battery-eligible VPP that stacks distribution payments with PJM wholesale revenue while PSE&G pays about $5,000 for an 8-kW home battery. For suppliers, more dispatchable flexibility on the system is a bearish force on the peak prices you pay, even as headline demand keeps climbing.