What if PJM capacity auction clears at record prices on tight margins?
Surging datacenter load and coal retirements collide in PJM, clearing the capacity auction at record prices that flow through to consumer bills and lift merchant-generation and utility earnings across the RTO.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Surging datacenter load and coal retirements collide in PJM, clearing the capacity auction at record prices that flow through to consumer bills and lift merchant-generation and utility earnings across the RTO. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Natural gas ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.