Search
March 9, 2026

Commentary

© RTO Insider 
California’s Anxiety is not About Seams; It’s About Control
For the first time in years, California’s grip on Western market design is genuinely at risk, writes Nick Myers of the Arizona Corporation Commission.
ACI
Data Centers Don’t Cause Rate Increases but Would Still be Wise to Supply Own Power
Data centers have become the whipping boy of high electric bills; consumers believe they are paying higher rates because of these power-hungry server farms. However, it is not that simple, writes Kristen Walker of The American Consumer Institute.
Hitachi Vantara
AI Has to be Reliable Before We Trust it with our Grid
Columnist Dej Knuckey says there’s no doubt AI can be exponentially faster, smarter, and more innovative and efficient than the current workforce, but can it be reliable?
BloombergNEF
How Should We Do Affordability?
According to the Business Council for Sustainable Energy’s 2026 Factbook, U.S. consumers spent “slightly less” on electricity in 2025 than they did in in 2024.
Colonial Pipeline
The Co-location Quandary: The Cybersecurity Risk to Nuclear
Opinion writer Shahid Mahdi worries about the cybersecurity risks of co-location, and asks if a co-located data center is hit with ransomware, does the nuclear plant have to trip offline?
NRDC
PJM’s Reliability Backstop Auction: Fixing Half the Problem
PJM, with prompting from 13 governors, is trying another solution to resource adequacy: the “Reliability Backstop Auction.” While details still are being negotiated, this boils down to throwing money at new power plants, says Tom Rutigliano of the NRDC.
The Century Foundation commentary with data from UC-CCP
Electricity Rates are the Political Livewire Threatening the Industry
Residential electricity bills have moved from being background noise in discussions about resource adequacy, decarbonization, and transmission expansion to being the loudest political and business risk, says Dej Knuckey.
Windy.com
Navigating Extreme Winter Storms: A System-of-systems Perspective
With Winter Storm Fern, we learned, once again, that our nation’s power grids rely on a significant fossil mix when the weather turns nasty, writes columnist Peter Kelly-Detwiler.
MISO
MISO’s Zero-injection Proposal: A Good Start, but It’s Not Enough
Limiting MISO large load solutions only to zero-injection scenarios misses the mark and can create a myriad of challenges now and in the future, writes David Sapper of the Clean Grid Alliance.
ICF EnergyInsite
Tech Companies Need a Hedge Against Worrisome Grid Politics
An alternative to connecting a large data center load to the electrical grid is a private, fully off-grid energy system, writes Travis Fisher of Cato.

Want more? Advanced Search