The White House has urged the operator of the largest electric grid in the United States to hold an emergency power auction to safeguard reliability and curb rising electricity costs as demand from data centres and artificial intelligence infrastructure outpaces generation capacity.

At a Washington event on Friday, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum joined a bipartisan group of state governors in calling on PJM Interconnection, which serves roughly sixty-seven million customers across thirteen states and the District of Columbia, to establish an emergency procurement auction to accelerate the construction of more than fifteen billion dollars in new generation capacity.

The proposed auction would facilitate long-term, fifteen-year contracts designed to underpin investment in new power plants, with participating tech companies and large power customers paying for capacity regardless of actual consumption, a mechanism described as “bring your own generation.” The initiative is intended to address reliability concerns and protect households and businesses from sharply higher capacity market prices, which set record highs recently and contributed to elevated utility bills.

White House officials argued that existing market structures have been too slow to allow new generation onto the grid as demand increases, threatening “rolling blackouts” in peak seasons.

PJM has forecast that its summer peak usage could climb to about two hundred and twenty gigawatts over the next fifteen years, up from a record one hundred and sixty-five gigawatts in two thousand six, while the region has processed more than one hundred and seventy gigawatts of generation requests since two thousand twenty-three.

In response to the administration’s call, PJM has unveiled its own plan encouraging large data centres to secure new generation or face supply curtailments during high-demand periods, and to expedite interconnection for state-sponsored projects.

The operator said it is reviewing the principles outlined by the White House and governors but was not formally invited to the announcement event.

Rising power costs have sparked political pressure from several governors who have publicly criticised PJM’s pace of permitting new generation and threatened to reconsider their participation in the regional grid.

The administration’s proposal reflects a strategic effort to rebalance the financial responsibility for new capacity, promote grid reliability and address consumer energy costs in key northeastern and mid-Atlantic states as national demand continues to grow.