Markets / PJM
PJM Interconnection
The world's largest data-center market, and almost no new gas in the queue.
0.7GW
Deliverable gas
95GW
Existing gas
5.8GW
Planned gas
Deliverable = signed interconnection agreement, in service by 2028, merchant (reconciled from the ISO's own queue). Existing and planned from EIA-860M.
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 the interconnection queue delivers almost no new gas to meet it: across the entire PJM footprint, only about 0.7 GW of gas is signed, near-term, and still to be built.
PJM's structure explains it: it is a capacity market, so firm power is met through the existing 95 GW gas fleet, the capacity auction (where prices have moved up sharply), and behind-the-meter deals, not through new merchant queue positions. Northern Virginia, the biggest demand in the country, has essentially zero signed, near-term merchant gas behind it.
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. If you build there for firm gas, you are buying into the capacity market or building your own generation, not contracting a merchant queue position.