PJM’s yearly auction for capacity, which on a grid means enough megawatts at the moment of peak demand, as against energy over the year. It is the auction through which the datacenters’ cost reached household bills. Chapter 6.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock
Where the electricity comes from: grid queues, transformers, turbines and the firm power a datacenter needs every hour of the year, on calendars the buildout does not control.
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Capacity auction.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/capacity-auction (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-capacity-auction-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Capacity auction}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/capacity-auction},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}