PJM Interconnection

Updated October 2026 from PJM's planning queue export of September 4, 2026. Existing and planned gas are from EIA-860M, August 2026.

PJM holds the world's largest concentration of data centers in the Dominion zone (Northern Virginia), and its own load forecast shows that zone leading all of PJM at about +6.7 GW of summer peak growth to 2030. Yet across the entire PJM footprint only about 1.1 GW of gas is signed and due by 2028, in six queue positions, out of about 12 GW of gas progressing through the queue.

Almost all of it, about 0.96 GW, is a new plant in Sullivan County, Indiana, due at the end of 2028, the edge of the window. EIA's August 2026 inventory lists the same plant for 2029, with regulatory approvals not yet started; if 2029 holds, PJM's figure falls to about 0.13 GW. The rest is uprates at existing plants in Illinois, New Jersey and Ohio. Northern Virginia has none. The West Virginia projects that made up most of the earlier figure are under construction, but their in-service date has moved to 2029, outside the 2026 to 2028 window.

All of it is merchant. PJM's queue file has no developer field, so we read each project's interconnection agreement as filed at FERC. All six customers are independent power producers.

PJM's structure explains the small number: it is a capacity market, so firm power is met through the existing gas fleet of about 97 GW, the capacity auction (where prices have moved up sharply), and behind-the-meter deals, not through new queue positions. EIA lists about 7.1 GW of planned gas across PJM.

For a data center, PJM offers the deepest ecosystem for fiber and latency, but Northern Virginia is also among the most constrained and expensive major markets for time-to-power. Building there for firm gas means buying into the capacity market or building your own generation, not contracting a queue position.

An earlier version of this page gave about 0.7 GW, mostly in West Virginia. It was built on an older PJM queue file.