Posted: September 19, 2025, 2:23 pm

If you are involved in the MISO capacity market in any meaningful way, you might have September 25 marked on your calendar. Recalling back just over a month ago, MISO had the unfortunate task of letting all capacity market participants know that a third-party software provider had miscalculated the capacity auctions….for the last eight years. Without getting too deep in the weeds, Loss of Load Expectations (LOLE) was calculated with an all hours approach instead of the tariff required peak hours, with the distinction being a discussion on another day. The error caused a financial impact of an early estimate of about $280 million with roughly 80 percent of the impact in this summer’s seasonal period. In very broad terms, this means that a participant was long capacity, expect to hear about a claw back, and if short a credit. MISO has made outgoing calls to those involved trying to set, or manage, expectations over the last month. September 25 is the day they marked where all adjustments or invoices will be updated…it could be a tears or cheers kind of day.

We’ve written plenty about AI and datacenters here in the WPO as the load growth conversation has warranted the attention. Specifically, Microsoft in Wisconsin has held our interest as more and more details have been made available. This morning the WSJ summed up comments recently made about the $3.3 billion project. It is nearing completion and is scheduled to come online in early 2026. The complex contains three buildings consisting of 1.2 million square feet covering 315 acres of land. As an aside, a few posts back we talked about the announced datacenter in Wisconsin. This isn’t it, that will be the $4 billion add on.

Anyway, according to the Journal, the facility will host “HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS” (our caps) Nvidia GB200 GPUs. Sometimes these numbers just get thrown out with no context, so we decided to dig a little deeper. Apparently, once you get past the words like dedicated decompression and such, according to Nvidia, one GB200 can query a database over 18x faster than my CPU driven laptop….or something like that.

This week we attended the North American Energy Markets Association (NAEMA) fall conference. That’s just a fancy title and acronym for traders, originators, and market participants. Our expectation going in was there would be plenty of discussion about topics such as capacity, load growth in datacenters, new generation assets and tax credits, etc. While we were not disappointed in the discussions over favorite beverages in the corner bar, we were surprised by the amount of shrugged shoulders and lack of answers. One of our key takeaways was the overwhelming majority opinion that datacenter load growth is overstated and won’t materialize as being touted. Frankly, as we stepped off the plane earlier this week, we had the exact same opinion. Roughly twenty years ago, James Surowiecki wrote The Wisdom of Crowds which basically says informed crowds make the right decision. While we aren’t willing to take the other side of the AI overbuild just yet, we are well aware crowded trades have volatile unwinding when wrong. At this point, it’s probably prudent to give some consideration that AI growth is legit and has some staying power.