Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

A mild, incident-free week kept real-time prices subdued across all eleven markets, so the week's signal came from cost reports and reliability orders. PJM's market monitor said third-quarter wholesale costs rose sharply and that forecast data-center demand made the capacity auctions uncompetitive, and a federal order keeping a Michigan coal plant online was set to lapse November 14. Generators, d...

As the season's first Arctic air begins to probe the eastern two-thirds of the country, the people who keep the lights on are entering winter 2026-2027 with a message that sounds contradictory: the nation's power plants are better prepared for extreme cold than ever, yet the system has less room for error than at almost any point in recent memory. Both are true, and the tension between them define...

Picture the Monday morning stand-up. Your team wants to know what the new AI rollout means for their jobs, whether the reorg announced last quarter is finished, and why the priorities you handed out in September changed again. You have maybe half the answers. The people who have the other half are in a planning offsite until Thursday. If that sounds familiar, you are not imagining it. On October 2...

Electricity prices became a central issue in the November 3 midterms. Democrats won the House and Senate after campaigns focused on affordability, including power bills. Rising rates made data-center development a target for voters concerned about the cost of serving large new loads. For utilities and developers, the results challenge the assumption that communities would welcome load growth and t...

North American wholesale power markets experienced a meteorologically quiet but strategically consequential week, as mild early-November conditions kept real-time prices subdued across virtually every footprint while attention shifted decisively toward winter preparedness and market-design conflict. Grid operators in the East and Midwest published winter outlooks that underscored a now-familiar te...

Natural gas now produces roughly two-fifths of U.S. electricity and is the fuel the grid leans on hardest during extreme cold, yet the gas and power systems are still scheduled, priced and regulated as if they were separate industries. This paper examines gas-electric coordination and winter reliability through the record of Winter Storms Uri, Elliott and Fern, the structural mismatch between the...

Think about the analyst who joined your team three years ago. She built the quarterly forecast by hand and got part of it wrong. You called her in and spent twenty uncomfortable minutes asking where her renewal assumption came from. She didn't have an answer. The next quarter, she did. Now she runs a small team and catches shaky numbers before they reach you. Now say that forecast goes to an AI to...

North American wholesale power markets settled into a quiet late-October shoulder-season pattern during the week of October 24-30, with mild, well-supplied conditions across the continent and no system-wide emergencies, demand records, or sustained scarcity events reported in any footprint. Day-ahead on-peak prices for the October 28 trade date reflected that calm, clearing in the roughly $42 to $...

For nearly a decade, the United States has not been able to build high-voltage transmission fast enough to carry the power it plans to generate and consume. This week, Washington moved to do something structural about it. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, a sweeping permitting package introduced at the end of September by a bipartisan group of four senators, is heading to...

In an October 2026 study, Boston Consulting Group asked 645 CEOs whether their employees trust leadership. Nearly 90% said yes. Among 500 employees asked the same question, only 46% agreed. A gap that wide means CEOs and employees are seeing two different companies. If you manage people, you are standing in the middle. Trust in leadership has been sliding for some time, and the 2026 data makes it...

North American wholesale power markets passed a quiet operational week, with mild shoulder-season conditions prevailing across every region and no heat event, cold snap, or scarcity pricing of note in any footprint. Real-time prices were soft and unremarkable from Texas to the Northeast, and the Western heat spell that had briefly lifted prices earlier in October had fully receded by the reporting...

American Electric Power announced on October 14 that it would invest roughly $4 billion in a 702-megawatt fuel cell facility near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and sell the output to Google under a 20-year power purchase agreement. The project reflects a growing problem for the U.S. power sector: data centers need electricity sooner than utilities can expand generation and transmission. Large electricity buy...

The arrival of artificial intelligence data centers has turned large-load interconnection into one of the most pressing problems in the North American power sector. Requests for new service now exceed the physical capacity of many systems, and the conventional answer of building generation and transmission first takes far longer than a data center takes to construct. This paper examines flexible l...

By late October, review meetings are filling calendars while the forms are still half finished. The task is familiar: summarize twelve months of someone's work in a few paragraphs, assign a rating, defend it in calibration, and then explain it in a conversation that is supposed to motivate the employee. A polished review still has to give the employee something useful. Research has questioned the...

North American wholesale power markets were defined this week by a brief but genuine reliability scare in the East rather than by the calendar. Unseasonable mid-October warmth collided with the year's heaviest autumn generator maintenance to produce the week's pivotal day on October 13. In PJM, roughly 46 GW of planned and about 60 GW of total generation sat offline, pushing effective load to appr...

The most consequential U.S. electric-power development this week concerned neither a new power plant nor a high-voltage corridor. It concerned the wires already in place. On October 13, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a roughly $581 million grid-expansion package centered on the Tennessee Valley Authority. The award shows that Washington’s near-term response to surging electricity demand w...

Friday is Boss's Day, when teams may pass around a card or bring in a sheet cake. A more useful gesture would be to find out whether the feedback managers believe they provide is reaching employees as intended. The numbers suggest that most employees do not experience feedback as often as their managers believe they provide it. When Gallup asked 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors ac...

The week of October 3-9 confirmed that the question of who pays for data-center and large-load growth has become the organizing issue across North American wholesale power markets, overtaking operational news in a mild early-autumn shoulder season. The clearest signal came from Washington, where the U.S. Department of Energy filed a statement of position at FERC on October 7 urging PJM to redesign...

The defining fight in the American electric-power sector is no longer whether the grid can be built fast enough to serve the surge in artificial-intelligence computing. It is who will pay for it. That question moved from abstraction to concrete regulatory consequence on September 29, 2026, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission largely accepted—but then suspended until February 28, 2027—PJM...

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July 2025 rewrote the federal incentive architecture that the Inflation Reduction Act had built only three years earlier. For wind and solar, the clean energy tax credit phaseout now runs on a hard calendar: projects that began construction by July 4, 2026 may still claim the technology-neutral credits if placed in service within the continuity window, while every...

Picture this: One of your analysts uses an AI tool to prepare a client summary on a Thursday afternoon. The tool invents a number. She catches it, fixes it, and delivers the report on time. She tells no one. The next week, a colleague pastes internal pricing data into a public chatbot to speed up a forecast, then deletes the chat. Nobody files a report. Nobody asks. From where you sit, AI adoption...

North American wholesale power markets spent the last week of September and the first days of October in a decidedly structural, rather than weather-driven, posture. Mild shoulder-season conditions across most of the continent kept real-time prices subdued and left capacity-market design as the dominant storyline. The single most consequential action was FERC’s September 29 decision to conditional...

For the better part of a decade, virtual power plants occupied an awkward position in the American electricity conversation. Utilities and system operators acknowledged the concept, researchers published optimistic cost curves, and a handful of programs showed that thousands of home batteries could, in principle, behave like a single power plant. Yet the virtual power plant remained something of a...

Picture the meeting where your company approved its AI budget. Someone put up a slide promising that employees would reclaim hours every week. Everyone nodded. Now look at your team’s calendar, your inbox, and the faces in Monday’s stand-up. Did those hours come back? For many managers, the answer is no—and the numbers suggest their experience is not unusual. Upwork surveyed 2,500 workers across t...

Two storylines dominated North American power markets during the week, both rooted in the same underlying pressure: surging data-center demand and the question of how the grid will be organized to serve it. In the West, the contest between CAISO's Extended Day-Ahead Market and SPP's Markets+ sharpened as the Bonneville Power Administration held its first day-ahead-market workshop under Administrat...