MISO Hit $260/MWh on Below-Normal Demand — the Grid Is Tighter Than the Bears Think

MISO Hit $260/MWh on Below-Normal Demand — the Grid Is Tighter Than the Bears Think A winter storm drove Midcontinent power above $260/MWh while demand ran 11% light, coal dark spreads are widening fast, and a data-center load wave is queuing up. The bearish MISO call is fighting the data. The market is leaning bearish on MISO real-time power, and three numbers in the data say it has the setup backwards. Start with the one that should stop any short in its tracks. During Winter Storm Fern, daily average power prices in the Midcontinent ISO exceeded $260 per megawatt-hour from January 26 to 28, even though electricity demand over those six days ran 11% lower than the same weekday period before the storm.¹ A grid that spikes above $260 on below-normal demand is not a loose market. It is a system so tight that it no longer needs a demand surge to produce an extreme price; a supply or weather shock alone does it. That tightness is showing up in the spreads, and this is the signal the bears are misreading. The dark spread, the margin for coal generation, increased 111% in 2025 against 2024 as electricity prices rose faster than coal fuel costs, and it has kept widening, averaging $28/MWh in the first four months of 2026, up 39% year over year.¹ Coal's economics in MISO are not collapsing; they are improving sharply, because coal prices rose only 3% while the average MISO electricity price jumped 44%.¹ A market pricing the structural decline of coal is missing that coal is currently one of the most profitable units to dispatch in the region, which puts a firmer, stickier floor under real-time prices than a renewables-displacement narrative implies. Gas tells the opposite half of the same story, and it matters for who sets the price. The spark spread, the margin for gas generation, rose just 18% in 2025 and averaged only $9/MWh early in 2026, because natural gas prices climbed 63% and offset the gains in power prices.¹ So gas is getting squeezed on fuel cost exactly as coal margins widen. In a tight grid, that pushes coal up the dispatch order and makes it the marginal price-setter more often, which is bullish for the real-time price the consensus is fading. Now layer on the demand the bears are underweighting. Entergy's gas projects, all of them gas-fired, make up nearly a third of the roughly 28 GW in MISO's fast-track interconnection queue, and about 70% of Entergy's proposed additions across Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are designed to serve planned data-center complexes.³ Entergy expects retail sales to grow 8.5% a year through 2030, partly on that industrial load, and plans to spend about $27 billion on new generation through 2029.³ Gas-fired capacity totals 20.3 GW, about 72% of the entire expedited-review queue.³ This is a wall of new baseload-style demand lining up behind a grid that already spikes to $260 on a cold snap. The bottleneck makes the demand more bullish, not less. US regional grid operators have asked FERC for an extension on a federal deadline to upgrade transmission, having been directed in 2021 to establish upgrade programs they are now struggling to deliver.² If the load arrives faster than the wires and generation can be built, the gap is filled by running existing units harder at higher real-time prices. A delayed buildout into rising demand is a recipe for more $260 prints, not fewer. Put the three signals together and the bearish MISO call looks like a fade of a tightening market. Coal dark spreads are widening and putting a firm floor under prices, gas spark spreads are squeezed so coal sets the margin more often, and a data-center demand wave is queuing into a grid that already produces extreme prices on modest stress. The contrarian read on MISO real-time, bullish on demand, is the one the data supports.^1,3 The signal to watch is the next weather event against the interconnection timeline.² If MISO prints another $260-plus spike on the next storm while the 20.3 GW of queued gas is still years from delivery, the real-time market reprices higher and the shorts get run over. If the queue clears fast and mild weather holds, the bears get their loose market. But a grid that hit $260 on 11% less demand has already shown which way it breaks under stress.¹