Catalyst · 31 Jul 2025 · 31m
Steve Piper, research director for North American Power and Renewables at S&P Global, explains why PJM’s recent capacity auction cleared at record-high prices, driven by data center load growth and revised reliability rules. He details how the auction price surged from ~$30/MW-day in the early 2010s to over $329/MW-day, hitting the price cap, and discusses the resulting retail rate impacts for consumers. Piper also analyzes the challenges facing new generation development, including gas turbine supply chain bottlenecks, and the underperformance of demand response resources in the latest auction.
large enterprises
Other shows on the same ground, closest first.
Chris Gammell details his new 13kW solar and Tesla Powerwall 3 installation, discussing the economics of virtual power plants and peak pricing. Dave Jones analyzes Australia's energy market, highlighting negative wholesale prices and the high cost of peak power generation. The hosts also discuss the impact of new US tariffs on the global electronics supply chain and the challenges of designing with tiny 0.35mm pitch BGA components.
Hosts Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze recent earnings from Apple, Qualcomm, ARM, and MediaTek, highlighting severe mobile supply chain bottlenecks and soft demand driven by elevated memory costs and foundry capacity constraints. They discuss skyrocketing hyperscaler CapEx from Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, focusing on the transition from AI training to inference, the rise of behind-the-meter power solutions like Bloom Energy, and critical labor shortages in electrical trades. The episode concludes with an examination of market volatility linked to hedge fund unwinds and the increasing reliance on debt financing for data center expansion.
The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by Catalyst. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.