What if a summer heatwave cascades into a PJM grid collapse?
A heat-driven cascading PJM failure forces mid-Atlantic rolling blackouts, spiking regional power and pulling gas peaker demand higher. The closest read is the 2006 PJM heat-wave strain and the August 2003 Northeast cascade, both of which exposed transmission fragility under peak load. Forward angle: PJM's queue is jammed with datacenter load (Northern Virginia 'Data Center Alley'), so reserve margins are thinning faster than capacity is added — the macro spillover is small but the regional power-price tail is real.
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 0–6 months 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. A heat-driven cascading failure across PJM darkens the mid-Atlantic, forcing rolling blackouts from Virginia to New Jersey. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Natural gas ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.