Pennsylvania targets PJM data opacity as utility load forecasts diverge by 200% to 11%
A budget law signed Sunday requires data centers and PJM to disclose demand data, lifting the lid on projections state officials say regulators cannot currently trust.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed a budget Sunday (2026-07-12) requiring data centers to report their annual water and electricity consumption to the state and compelling PJM Interconnection to give Pennsylvania regulators greater access to its demand forecasting process — a direct answer to what state officials describe as systemic unreliability in the grid's planning data.4
The immediate catalyst was a projection gap that would unsettle any capacity planner. A Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission analysis found one state utility projecting load growth exceeding 200% over the next nine years, while the next closest competitor projected 11% over the same period. State Representative Nick Miller, D, put it directly: "the process by which utilities and load-serving entities submit information to PJM is opaque, and policymakers, regulators, and stakeholders lack confidence in the data's reliability."4
An 18-fold difference in projected load growth rates across adjacent utilities goes beyond forecasting uncertainty. It raises the possibility that utilities are applying fundamentally different assumptions about how much capacity their data center customers will actually draw — or that some are blending speculative hyperscaler commitments with firm contracted load without distinguishing between the two.4
The underlying demand pressure is real. The IEA found that data centers now account for roughly half of incremental US electricity demand growth. Global data center electricity consumption rose 17% in 2025, with AI-focused facilities growing at 50% in the same period, according to IEA data. On Tuesday (2026-07-14), PJM Western Hub spot power was trading at $72.38 per megawatt-hour, reflecting the sustained tightness developing across the mid-Atlantic market.1
PJM's interconnection queue has already proven unequal to the pace of change. Of all capacity projects that entered the queue between 2000 and 2019, only 13% had reached commercial operation by end-2024, per IEA data; 77% had been withdrawn. That failure rate reflects years of permitting delays, supply chain constraints, and queue backlog — not an absence of underlying demand.1
PJM stakeholders took a near-term step on Tuesday (2026-06-30), approving a two-part reliability backstop procurement plan designed to address an expected power supply shortfall within two years. The plan allows utilities, load-serving entities, and potentially data centers themselves to contribute directly to procurement.3
Backstop mechanisms address symptoms rather than the upstream planning problem. Utilities across PJM territory have spent close to $6 billion installing roughly 12 million smart meters, but independent analysts note the data from those meters has not been shared in ways that would materially improve system-level load forecasting. More granular metering data helps at the margin; it cannot fix demand submissions that rest on developer pipeline projections with no clear path to interconnection.2
Pennsylvania's law creates a parallel data trail outside PJM's own systems. The state Department of Environmental Protection will publish annual reports on aggregate energy and water consumption trends for data centers, with environmental recommendations. That gives regulators an external record to cross-reference against what utilities submit to PJM.4
Whether the reporting mandate changes behavior at the utility level will depend on enforcement scope and whether the PJM transparency provision gives state regulators real standing to challenge submissions. The first annual reports will function as an independent cross-check on whether utility load submissions reflect firm contracted demand or projections built on data center pipeline commitments that may not materialise on the timelines utilities have assumed. PJM reserve margins for the late 2020s will ultimately be priced against that answer.4,1