President Donald Trump gestures before boarding Air Force One en route to Detroit, Michigan, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, Jan. 13, 2026.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
The Trump administration on Friday will push the largest electricity grid in the U.S. to make the big technology companies pay for new power plants.
Electricity prices have exploded in recent years on PJM Interconnection due in large part to the data centers that tech companies are building to train and power artificial intelligence.
The PJM grid serves more than 65 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C. Its service area includes northern Virginia, the largest data center market in the world.
President Donald Trump wants PJM to hold an emergency auction in which the tech companies would bid on contracts for new electricity generation, a White House official told CNBC.
Trump wants PJM to build $15 billion of new baseload power generation, the official said. He also wants PJM to cap the amount that existing power plants can charge in the grid’s capacity market to protect ratepayers, the official said.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and governors from the mid-Atlantic region will announce an agreement Friday morning urging PJM to take these actions, the official said.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the administration is leading a unprecedented bi-partisan effort urging PJM to fix the energy subtraction failures of the past, prevent price increases, and reduce the risk of blackouts,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said.
Bloomberg first reported the news.
Utility bills are rising in many parts of the U.S. despite Trump’s promise to lower energy prices during his presidential campaign. The issue played a major role in the landslide victories of Democrats Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger in the governors’ races of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively.
The price to secure power capacity in PJM has exploded in recent years with $23 billion attributable to data centers, according to watchdog Monitoring Analytics. Those costs are passed down to consumers. This amounts to a “massive wealth transfer,” the watchdog told PJM in a November letter.
PJM was six gigawatts short of its reliability requirement for 2027 in its most recent auction. Six gigawatts is equivalent to six large nuclear plants.
The power shortage makes blackouts more likely, said Abe Silverman, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who served as general counsel for New Jersey’s public utility board from 2019 to 2023 under Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
“Instead of a blackout happening every one in 10 years, we’re looking at something more often,” Silverman said.