Posted: September 5, 2025, 10:07 am

We seem to be at risk of turning this publication into the Weekly Datacenter instead of Power Outlet, but we just follow the news. Yesterday afternoon it hit the tape that Oracle was in the final stages of securing $38 BILLION from JP Morgan and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group for two datacenter campuses with one each in Texas and Wisconsin. As an aside and for context, $38 billion is roughly $25 billion in 2009 dollars, which is what JP Morgan and other big banks were provided with TARP (fair disclosure, CEO Jamie Dimon has maintained, they didn’t need the money). This is on the heels of Meta’s announced $29 billion spend on datacenters in the US.

Coincidently, Wisconsin Energy Corp, released a investor update earlier this week. Part of the presentation was dedicated to their Very Large Customer Tariff (VLC) which was introduced late last year and is in the hands of the WI PUC. A snapshot from the presentation explains their VLC. This was basically created for Microsoft who has committed to a huge presence in the southern Wisconsin and has recently expressed interest in expanding. Ironically, with this presentation was a slide page with the company logos of “Powering Industry Leaders in Our Region” which included the likes of Foxconn, Microsoft, and Amazon. Not yet making the list was Oracle- yet.

https://s22.q4cdn.com/994559668/files/doc_presentations/2025/Sep/02/09-2025-September-Final.pdf

Last week PJM announced they would start exploring the possibility of a “sub-annual” capacity market. It’s fair to assume the “exploration” will indeed turn into something resembling other ISOs capacity markets. For instance, for those unfamiliar, MISO has a seasonal market that correlates to the calendar with four distinct time frames. Right now, MISO is in the middle of summer capacity where prices are $666.50/MW-day. MISO capacity markets, and Santa, might be the only reason people would be wishing for winter where the seasonal price drops to $33.20/MW-day.

PJM Executive Vice President – Market Services and Strategy, Steve Bresler stated, “risks to grid reliability in winter are different than summer, and it makes sense to explore how to procure needed capacity in ways that better reflect these realities”. Just thinking about the characteristic of generation assets and fuel types, that seems like a pretty reasonable statement. Natural gas has a heating market in winter and solar has less sunshine. Also, load shapes change as keeping your house comfortable is for the most part driven by electricity in summer while not so much in winter. Because of this, and the programs already being implemented in other ISOs, when and not if this happens is probably the right question.