PJM's $12B Modeling Mistake Is Hitting Ratepayers Again

Hello everyone, welcome back to Seminolesis Weekly. We've got episode twenty six and we are here with Robert Boswell. We're gonna talk all about US rate payers US rate payers wasting twelve billion dollars of money that they don't have to waste because PJM is making a modeling mistake and they want to do it again. Rob, welcome to the show, man. I I appreciate that you're

Thanks for the data.

you're there in your man cave with the crystals and the kiwi. It's look looking great.

Yeah, I gotta, you know, gotta balance out, bring out my feminine side, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I love the crystals. Who doesn't love crystals?

Yeah, we're gonna have a nice feminine podcast where we talk about the electricity grid in Pennsylvania and Maryland today and Virginia, okay? okay, let's start with the basics. So the high level call that you guys are making here is that well, first of all, maybe you can explain like what PJM is, like really basic, what's happening in the electricity grid in the US right now, and why Americans are gonna see their power bills rise.

Well, yeah, that's the thing. don't necessarily have to. So, PJM stands for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, but it's actually 13 states. It's Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and on top of that, the District of Columbia. It's not all of all of those states. Some of them are partial, but... Yeah, it's a mouthful for the acronym to be all of the states. So they stuck with just paper towels. Yeah, this is 66.

this is US East One, like like this is data center alley.

This is 66 million people. is data center alley. This is the largest grid by electricity delivered in America or the largest sort of operational area in America. And it's also what's driving a lot of the narrative around data centers driving up electricity prices. if you, know, hundreds, maybe thousands of articles, and I always kind of just check this whenever it says that data centers lead to increased electricity rates, I always see what the source is and it's almost always specific to PJM. Like this is not, there are some very small instances of this happening outside of PJM, but PJM is a particularly large driver of both the narrative, but also it's the area that is seen by far the largest rate increases. due to increase in demand and that's yeah, we are take and we've written about this before and we're writing about this again from a slightly different perspective this time is that that's due to Market design or not really even market design more like sort of bureaucratic auction design

Okay, let's dig into that specifically. So PJM is unique when compared to other grids, even in the US, in the way that they do these auctions, right?

Yeah, so it's normal in in electricity markets to have kind of real time markets and then like more ahead of time markets. So you just, want to build in a buffer to how the electricity system runs. And so you run these auctions years in advance to make sure that you have enough spare capacity on the system that, know, in the worst case scenario, it operates well. And normally You actually only run those markets for either new capacity because they need long-term contracts, they need a degree of certainty to get built, or you're running them for like refurbishments or yeah, life extensions, things like that. You're basically just trying to keep some give in the system. And PJM is unusual where they run this for the entire system. And so every power plant can bid into this, like fully existing ones that are completely paid off. And what that means is that any price increase has like a massive multiplier effect across the, if you think about like an X and Y axis, you a small price increase on the Y axis that's multiplied across the entire X axis. And because this is a very large grid, because it's the largest grid in America, that can lead to some quite large price spikes, which is what we've seen.

Yeah. And this is definitely why maybe people talk a lot about how as AI data centers or just energy demand in general in the US increases over time, we need to solve this with baseload, but also variable capacity because there's, you know, fluctuations in demand throughout the year. this is not implying that there's actually variable capacity for the entire grid in PJM. It's just saying that they pay for everything and they do their planning upfront with this market. auction style approach and that's gonna lead to well what can you tell me what what's that leading to in this case?

Yeah, so what's happening is that for various reasons, PGM has a constrained supply. So in the article, we kind of map out the supply curves and you can see the supply curve lift literally sort of shifting left as you're having fewer power plants that are able to join this auction, even as demand is going up. And this is because PGM delayed its auctions for a while. It's now running its auctions with very little lead time. like once you sign one of these contracts, you need to be delivering that power within a year or now two years, which is just not long enough for a new power plant to get built. And so there's very sort of constrained supply and more constrained suppliers, the more shift the left, but also the more vertical is. Yes. You got the, got it there. Like if demand then moves at all price jumps and you know, this is, that's very normal in markets. If you can strain supply and then demand increases. you you get scarcity pricing and that's basically what's happening here. So two things are happening simultaneously where PGM is constraining supply through bad auction design, not giving enough warning and not signing long enough contracts such that new supply can't enter the market. And then also it is inflating demand, which is the main focus for what we get into in this newsletter and in the model in general where because it underestimates how much power it already has available to it, which we can get into, it's trying to buy more than it needs to. And it has bought more than it needs to in two previous auctions, which is where the $12 billion comes from. And it's got an emergency auction coming up, which there is a risk that it will buy more than it needs to there and actually put ratepayers at risk of further price increases. Yeah, which. because basically they're expecting data centers to take on this liability and they might just not be able to, or they might not turn up. There's a kind of moral hazard there, but I can get into the of demand, the supply modeling and that as well.

Yeah, well maybe first put the twelve billion dollar excess payment in context. Like this is actually still a large percentage of the total consumer spend on power from PGM.

Yeah, yeah. So over the last four auctions, they spent $63 billion and 12 of it, we estimate was avoidable. And all 12 is actually from the first two auctions. The cause of primarily governorship hero, but also other sort of political pressure, price caps were put in. And these price caps mean that actually sort of Demand and supply were kind of so out of whack, were so constrained that even this modeling adjustment wouldn't have had enough of an effect to sort of change things. But in the first two auctions, in the auction for 2025-26, these run June to July, so they're split years, 2025-26 and 26-27 would have saved seven billion and five billion respectively. and yeah, so 12 billion in total across those two auctions if they model this differently. And there's only such a huge effect because supply is so constrained, because you're working right at the edge of the supply curve and it's going kind of vertical, which they shouldn't do ideally. That's why you have these huge price increases.

Yeah, can you dig into both of those a little more detail?

Yeah, I've talked about the supply going vertical a bit, is you're not getting enough warning. The interconnection queue is the other thing. So PGM is currently just very slow to get connected to the grid if you're a new power plant. because of various things that PJM did. They had a pause, they've had a whole bunch of changes to how they run that process, which have introduced lot of delays, and they're running these auctions on way too little warning. So these auctions should be run on three years warning, and even that's a bit tight, in my opinion, but they've been run on one to two years warning, and so you just can't get a power plant up and running, and so it's really constrained supply. And then the thing that we're actually really getting into in this modelling effort is that power plants are more efficient in the winter. They get cooled down more easily if they're a coal or a nuclear power plant. But most importantly for a gas power plant, the air inlet, the air is denser so the power plant is easier to be cooled and it also is running more mass. It's basically just a more efficient system. There are also certain ways in which cooler temperatures help with electricity systems in general but the main one is the dense air going into gas turbines and this has been proposed in the past where currently PJM just runs it as if it's summer all year round. It just basically acts as if they have summer ratings efficiencies. And as much as endless summer would be a lot of fun, it's simply not the case. Winter will come. Winter is coming. And so it inaccurately forecasts that or inaccurately models that when it's deciding how much to buy. And then the other factor that we model, so we model sort of two things that change how you understand the current power plants operating. One is that and the other is imperviousness to winter, so winterization or weatherization. So during Storm Elliott in 2022, but then also during the polar vortex in 2014, power plants came offline due to componentary freezing or due to pipelines cracking. And a lot of effort has been put in since to prevent this from happening again, to make sure that because a lot of these components actually failed within their operational margins, so they should have been fine. It wasn't the case that the weather was so bad that it was sort of physically impossible to keep these things online. If they had been properly winterized, then this shouldn't have happened. And so there's been federal orders, there's been various local mandates, et cetera, to winterize these units. However, and the graph you've got up on screen explains this well, the way that PJM models this is purely backwards looking. So they only look at... when power plants have failed in the past and then extrapolate that out into the future. And as any good financial professional knows, past performance is not a predicate for future performance. And so rather than that, what I think would be a better way of doing it would be to reward power plants that winterize by recognizing that they are more reliable and they would get more money out of this auction system. And so you would create, rather than currently, which is mainly just a stick. You would also introduce a carrot into the system, but also you would prevent yourself from over buying. You prevent the system from spending more than it needs to.

Okay, can you can you explain the auction concept there again, maybe in a bit more detail, just to say when

Yeah.

you're saying they're gonna get more money, like explain how the auction works and how power plants actually get paid by PGM for the power that they're producing.

Yeah, the key thing is that it's it's megawatt days is the guy I'm lose all of our listeners at this point. The moment I said that, just cut. The unit is megawatt, so it's capacity. It's not generation. It's not how many electrons are actually made. It's kind of ability to make electrons. It's like paying a farmer for having a field as opposed to paying them for the wheat that comes from the field. It's kind of capacity to produce. And it's so that you have this reliability margin. It's so that you know that on the worst possible day of the year, you make sure that there's enough electricity. Normal markets have this. There's a lot of debate over whether or not these things are necessary, but they're seen as the more reliable approach or the more sensible or kind of well-insured approach. And so what literally happens is, PJM runs an auction and says that we need. whatever it is, gigawatts of capacity on our worst possible day, we need that much. So we're going out to market and we're buying 160 gigawatts of capacity. And they actually, draw a price curve. say, if it's really cheap, we're willing to buy 170 gigawatts, right? Because like, you know, that extra margin is worth it to us. if it's really expensive, then this is the price that we're going to kind of top out at. And they literally draw a, you know, straight out of like an economics textbook, they draw a demand curve. and they run an auction and people bid and people just say, right, I'm willing to pay whatever. And here's the amount of capacity that I'm bringing to the table. Then that draws the supply curve. Each one of those bids is like a dot on this supply curve. And then wherever the two cross, that's your price and that's your quantity. But the key thing is everyone gets paid this price. So if you bid in at $5. a megawatt day, which a lot of people do, that is a price that people bid, that's not excessively small, you will still get paid $300 a megawatt day if that's what the last unit needs. And so that's why you can have very big total cost changes to an auction due to a very small number of megawatts right at the end of the supply curve.

So can you explain again the concept of getting credit for a power plant that has winterized?

Yeah, so every power plant gets rated for how reliable it is and that determines its volume. you can be, so for example, nuclear power plants are rated higher than gas power plants because they're considered more reliable, they're considered more kind of robust. And so if you are a... 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant, you get rated at about kind of 90%, so say 93%. And so you get more money basically per your power plant than a gas-fired power station, which might be rated at say 80%. And if you say, right, we actually think this is a really good gas-fired power station. This is like a really well-winterized, it's in really good location, it's got a very short pipeline, the various things, know, really well-built, good design. Actually, we think that should be worth 85%, 88%, and it should get more money by bidding. It should be able to bid into that auction with more volume, basically, and then it gets more money. And this money is literally, it's a year, it's covering a year. and you get paid the money. don't know how to say it more simply than that. just sort of that money just comes in. There are ways to violate the contract, but short of violation, it's just revenue. It just comes straight in the door.

Yeah. Yeah, so I think the like just to go back to what you said about the winterization, like people have gone out and done this pretty good thing after they saw Storm Elliott or the Polar Vortex and upgraded their power plants to be better winterized, and then they don't get paid more money.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say to what extent this is up to goodness of their own hearts because NERC, N-E-L-C, National Energy Regulatory Commission, anyway, they told them to do this. They said, right, it is now a legal mandate for you to go and winterize your plants. And there was a number of other mandates to do this as well. They were also fined, the ones that failed during Storm Elliott were fined, so they have financial reasons to go and not do that again. But yeah, there's kind of two things going on here. One is you're right, they're not being incentivized to do the right thing or to do the thing that the system wants them to do. But then also the system's just over buying. The system is not recognizing the value of what it already has, i.e. how reliable its existing power plants are. It then goes to market and asks for too much. then goes to market and yeah. yeah, so yeah, what you put on the screen is kind of trying to talk through, it's quite a large range here. And to be clear, this is very much a range. not kind of putting, we're not saying this should be the number. We're just saying like, there is a lot of margin in here that PJM could be accessing its value. Like it could be saving this money for its rate payers if it were more accurate in terms of. how it rates technology. mean, my idea, like, big picture question here is the old, PJM is kind of the poster child for good or for ill of the old fashioned way of running an electricity system, which is like very centralized control, pretty bureaucratic, pretty democratic in an interesting kind of way, in a complicated way. And so it very much takes onto itself. deciding how much capacity is needed and all of this sort of central planning versus other grids that are, know, the famous one at the other end of the spectrum is Texas with with ERCOT, which are much less centrally planned and much more decentralized. And yeah, this currently PGM is due to odd reasons of governance and system modeling. it is failing at keeping up with the times. It hasn't seen demand growth in a very long time, arguably in about two decades, and it is really fumbling the bag now that demand growth has turned up. And this is a shame because data centers should be a way to make electricity cheaper, not a way to make electricity more expensive because electricity systems are very high fixed cost. You know, you've got the pylons, you've got the power plants, you've got... all of this physical infrastructure. So as a commodity, it's incredibly high fixed cost. And so there are great economies of scale. So the more demand you have, the more you can spread that fixed cost out across everyone, the higher the utilization rate you can hit is, the more efficiently you can run. And also with data centers, because they're, you these value creating or money printing machines. This has got to be by far the largest differential between cost of electricity in versus value out that has ever existed in an electricity system. That's an amazing opportunity for electricity to get really cheap because they can invest in these systems and they can grow the system, drive the efficiency. They've got loads of vested interest in making this system work. And if you look at... stand too hard for the data center industry. if you look at the transcripts and the meeting minutes, the data centers are really coming into this with a lot of solutions. And they are more than happy to put the money where the mouth is on most things, with some exceptions. I'm sure there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. But they are meaningfully pot committed to this region. This is a region where loads of their workforces, this is where a lot of the people in these meetings, this is where they live, this is home for them. And they're currently going, right, well either we figure this out or I'm moving to Texas. Those are my sort of options as an individual, but also these companies and these organizations. So they want to make PJM work. And it's a real shame that PJM's not figuring this out.

Yeah. maybe we could go back to that demand side. Like I think what likely happens here is that people see a high level headline or people who live in the region see their electricity bill and they see the price go up, and then they immediately blame the demand side as you're describing. Like there's so

Yeah.

many more data centers being brought online, therefore there's more demand for electricity. There's some limit in terms of how much electricity can be brought into the grid or how much the grid can support, how much Power generation there can be. And so therefore, you know, more demand chasing fixed supply means increases in price. And I think while that dynamic exists to an extent, we have made two cases in seek sequential articles. One is that there is a lot the forecast PJM's in a previous article, PJM's forecast for actual data center demand was being criticized because it was less accurate than our model. And now we're also talking about the supply side being, you know, an issue and and being criticized. Is there something beyond the modeling, better modeling, like that they could be doing to actually upgrade the grid itself? And maybe you can just talk about like generally what's going on with electricity grids right now. Like what's the technical stuff that everybody's struggling with?

Yeah, the key thing I'll just pick up on there is that you said fixed supply, right? Like, yes, if demand goes up with a fixed supply, then price goes up. But there's no reason why supply needs to be fixed, right? Like, you can have increased supply, and then you can actually, if the new supply is, theoretically, you should be bringing on new supply that's more efficient and more modernized than old supply, and that you can get into nuances there. On the electricity system, think the opportunity that's being wasted here is basically deployment of batteries. That's probably a very big one. There's a huge amount of opportunity for bringing down the price of electricity through better deployment of batteries.

yeah, is there something in the transmission of electricity, in the substations, in the transformers? Is there something to do with the actual like power lines in the grid, the physical infrastructure that prevents people from putting a power plant, you know, on one side of the grid, hundreds of miles away, and then the data center

Yeah, I mean.

on the other side of the grid, right?

This is a slightly separate point, I'm gonna give you my sort of high level take on this, and it might be something that I need to kind of do further research on before we kind of write about something similar. But

Fair enough.

PJM has been described as too big to function. And one of the ways in which it is arguably too big to function is that it does these deliverability studies. that work across a very large area. And so it's basically saying, right, if we deliver a power plant here in Washington, D.C., or in Washington, D.C., but in Virginia, can it reach Illinois? Can it reach sort of the other end of PGM? Like, is there enough space in those wires? And you arguably just shouldn't do that. You should arguably try to have much more localized work. And this way you'd be able to connect power plants, be able to connect new demand to the grid much faster. And so a lot of grids do this where they basically just say, right, okay, we're actually just doing sort of operability areas. We're just saying that you only need to be able to supply your power to a large enough area that we think overall this is going to work out. And PGN, this is a lot of why their interconnection studies take a very long time and why connecting to the grid takes a long time and why arguably this is what I'm not certain on, but I've seen some data that says that PGM is building more grid than it needs to. Because it's doing, people call it copper plating, where you basically just turn the entire area into wires such that it's basically just like copper plated. And so that is a potential criticism of PGM, which I have read elsewhere and I'm sort of, I'm susceptible to because I know of it happening. You be able to tell from my accent I'm British. It's something that we've done in Britain. In Britain, we've arguably significantly overbuilt our electricity system for different reasons to PJM. But yes, so that is one thing, that building out these wires, copper is expensive, know, transformers have a very long lead time. This kind of infrastructure is hard to build. And so there is some degree of that going on. But really, yeah, really this is about better pairing up demand with supply. And that can be done, yeah, locationally, which is relevant to these wires. And then it can also be done over time, where new demand needs to be bringing new supply, or at least linked to new supply. It doesn't necessarily need to be bringing it to themselves. Like, that's what these capacity auctions are supposed to do. They're supposed to help bring new supply online to meet new demand, but they're just very bad at doing it.

Makes sense man. where should we go from here? Is there anything that we haven't covered that you think we should?

So the emergence of the auction is the next thing. PGM models that it currently has, well, that it will have by 2020-29 6.8 gigawatts shortfall. That it'll be short of what it forecasts demand to be then versus what it will have as supply by 6.8 gigawatts. This is partially because of the price. caps meaning that these auctions didn't clear but frankly even if there hadn't been the price caps I think the price caps were probably the right thing to do given other constraints but price caps were probably the right thing to do given the other constraints. But yeah, so you've got the 6.8 gigawatt shortfall and we think that if you better took into account the cold weather uplift and the winterization, you would actually only need about three gigawatts. So you'd save more than half. And this is important, one, because it would just save that money. It would just save that kind of 3.8 gigawatts of procuring it. But two, the way that PGM's board, specifically the board, has chosen to design this emergency auction, actually against the wishes of its members. So, PGM has these big complicated votes. It has over a thousand members, they're split down into five groups, each one of the groups votes, and you need the equivalent of 66 % to get anything through. So, surprise, surprise, a lot of the time things don't get through. But they actually did agree on a different auction design that didn't have this problem. The PGM's board has decided... that it is going to sign these contracts. So these are long-term contracts going out to 2042, which is a good thing. Long-term contracts are good for new capacity. But they don't necessarily have a counterparty. PGM doesn't have its own money, right? PGM just has ratepayers' money. It just kind of passes through these costs to ratepayers. And the theory is that PGM is going to pass this through to new demand load in the form of data centers. But it's not a given that this new load appears, right? So it could contract out it could contract 6.8 gigawatts of new load out to 2032, 2032, 2042, 2043. out sort of 11 to 15 years depending on the start date and then not have anyone to pay for it. And so it would have to go on existing rate pairs because if you're a data center looking at this, and we go into this in depth in the article, in the newsletter, but if you're a data center looking at this deal, you really don't know what you're signing up for. There's a very high price cap of 555, dollars a megawatt day, which over the full 15 years could be up to, for the amount that they're trying to contract could be up to 21 billion dollars. And if you're the data center, you don't really know what you're agreeing to. This is all still being decided. This auction is going to happen pretty soon. It's happening September, October this year. So yeah, end of next month basically. And I think there's a very real possibility that data centers don't turn up. don't take on these liabilities. And then PGM is stuck there holding the bag. And PGM can't hold the bag because it doesn't have its own money. So what's going to actually happen is the existing ratepayers are going to hold the bag.

Okay. And then you were basically saying that there was a coalition that was making this case against how this is gonna work and they got overruled?

Yeah, yeah, they basically said that PJM just shouldn't take on the liability and then pass it on. The data centers should just take it on direct, which I think is a much better system where data centers should kind of rock up, sign on the dotted line, say I need X amount, and then either bring their own power through their own contracting, or you could even run an auction where the data centers have kind of pre-committed, but they might not be willing to pre-commit. That's debatable. Yeah, and I mean, the key thing here is, PJM's board overrode this because they thought that the alternative that was supported by the membership wouldn't procure enough power. And so if our modeling is correct and they don't need that much power, then they didn't need to overrule the membership. Like that's the thing. It all comes back to, it's very important. If you're centralizing the...

Sorry, hold up. They they they have this vote, they get more than two thirds required, and then the board just overrules it and says, No, you're wrong.

Yeah.

Why have the vote?

Yeah, I'm not understanding. mean, I, yeah, it's quite, it's quite something. mean, well, I mean, you know, not everything's good to be as a democracy, you know, to be run as a democracy, right? at no, you know, democracy doesn't work in all cases. But yeah, it does. It does seem

It's democracy until you do something we disagree with.

Something like that, yeah. But then again, the board, there are plenty of times that I wish the board had overruled the, the real depths of this in terms of why this has been voted down in the past, why this was voted through this time but then shot down. You need a politics thesis and like three psychiatrists to actually get to the bottom of the back and forth of like what's actually gone on. in PJM, which is not something that I go into at any great depth in the newsletter. plenty of people are more than welcome to look into that in their own time.

Maybe we can loop around, you can grab your crystals from behind you and then we can make some forecasts here. We can ask the Oracle about w what what the zodiac signs of different board members are and, you know what sort of

You can really get to understand it.

Is Mercury Mercury in retrograde while this vote was going on or what?

Yeah, I honestly it's the complexities of it and the motivated voting and the ability to veto and the vested interests and because yeah, a lot of the people voting are existing generators, right? So they're currently getting windfalls off the back of this. They're getting windfalls off this kind of constrained supply and increased price. And I think a lot of them also want to build new power plants. like, you know, that's not the same. They're all just kind of sitting on their hands. Like it's just, it's a highly complicated system that PGM has built. my interpretation, so too big to function was actually a, was actually something said by the federal energy regulatory commissions, chair. And my interpretation of that was that it's too big to function in terms of its bureaucracy and its governance. it literally can't. function, it can't navigate its own systems of governance. And it's also just physically very large, but being a large grid shouldn't be a problem, right? Electricity grids benefit from scale. Being big is good if you're an electricity grid, so long as you're able to make the design choices and make the governance choices that mean that that works. It means that you actually benefit from those efficiencies of scale. yeah, PGM is really struggling and it's gone. A lot of political engagement now with governor's races coming up at the end of this month, not the end of this month, end of this year, sorry, November. We've got a whole, we've been digging right into data center moratoriums and there's loads of chatter in Ohio, all over the place for the political problems around this. And it is very frustrating that again and again, PJM is the evidence for data centers leading to price increases and Surprise, surprise if you suddenly start trying to explain that it's actually the nuances of market design. It's not as catchy. It doesn't start to get.

I I I yeah, I mean th maybe not on the technical side, but I I'm getting the sense that there's there's some potential, you know, investigative journalism opportunities here, or that there's some you know, soap opera style drama that could be coming up if you're sitting in on some of these board votes and stuff. So may maybe we can hook in some new viewers

I'm only like, yeah, you.

to the PJM board votes.

I have got a whole bunch of transcripts of some of these meetings and they really are kind of... It does make me wonder what's going on behind the scenes. sure... I hope there are some journalists logging it out trying to sort of walk the corridors of these meetings, but sadly I doubt that there are. I don't think it sells copy. This is why you've got to come here.

Calling all journalists. Listening to

This is the only place.

Yeah, yeah. Cool. okay, is there a way to turn this around and end this on a happy note? How about we say this? It is good generally that they're costing people money and making sure that there is no shortfall, because shortfalls are worse than having too much capacity and paying more money than it.

Yeah, yeah, mean the counter argument is you can't be too careful, right? Like it's fine to overpay and to have more capacity than you need because yeah, you can't be too careful, electricity is incredibly important. But...

Yeah, you should be able to bring on more load now. You should be able to fund these guys to build a new power plants that they want to build by giving them more money. all at the expense of the American taxpayer. Rate payer, I'm sorry, wrong term, rate payer.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can give the negative case against the positive case, but I feel like that defeats the point

Ha ha.

of view of the positive case.

Try to end positive here, man. We did four four forty minutes of negative already. all right.

No!

Sounds like we're just yeah. Unfortunately we're Debbie Downers on everything going on at P J right now.

No, we need to come with more positive pieces on the utilities that we like. I mean, we obviously like Urquhart and PJM can still turn it around. Right. They really can. These auctions are only every year, as in they only cover the year that they cover. So the moment you time them out, you stop paying those high prices. These are not necessarily baked in for very long periods of time. So the auctions currently last until... partway through 2029, so only three more years of higher rates and then they can come back down again, so it's not too bad in the grand scheme of things. mean load growth, like if data centers can make their case, then electricity load growth is by far the best way to bring down electricity prices. You can do, you know, bring your own power in terms of behind the meter or backup power. You can do batteries for like increased utilization. You can even do demand flexibility, either of the data center or of other people. I'm gently skeptical of demand flexibility of data centers, but they're definitely very impressive people working on that. And so yeah, hope that they're right.

Awesome. Okay. Well, really appreciate you coming on today. I enjoyed this time, learned a lot, and yeah, good job.

Thanks, man. You too.