Exelon, the holding company for six U.S. utilities, expects to own regulated power plants again within five years. An executive of the company said so in an interview published by POWER magazine on 21 October. Exelon gave up its generation in the 2022 split from Constellation Energy and today owns only transmission and distribution businesses: ComEd, PECO, BGE, Pepco, Delmarva Power and Atlantic City Electric, serving about 10.9 million electric and gas customers, all of them inside the PJM grid.
The Queue Behind The Meter
The reason is load. Exelon counted 18 GW of high-probability data center demand at the end of 2025. After it began requiring transmission security agreements, the figure fell to about 11 GW in the second quarter of 2026, roughly 9 GW in ComEd territory and 2 GW in the Mid-Atlantic. Another 25 GW is being studied or waits for a study. For scale, POWER notes that ComEd's all-time peak, set in 2011, was 23,753 MW, and the executive said the high-probability load and the pipeline together would more than double it.
Under such an agreement a customer has 30 days to sign, pays for ten years of transmission cost tied to the load it requested and posts collateral. Exelon says this is meant to protect other ratepayers if a project never gets built, and the fall from 18 to 11 GW came after the screening began.
Why The Capacity Market Gets The Blame
The executive argued that PJM's capacity auctions send a price signal one year at a time, three years ahead, while a power plant takes five to seven years or more to build. Exelon's own calculation, as POWER reports it, is that PJM customers paid $32 billion in capacity prices over two auctions and received 1.2 GW less generation. The 2028/2029 auction cleared 6,831 MW short of PJM's reliability requirement. FERC accepted PJM's reliability backstop procurement on 29 September but suspended it until 28 February 2027, and on 9 October it rejected PJM's interim resource adequacy service. The executive called the backstop a way to stop things from getting worse, not a fix.
Exelon wants state laws that let regulated utilities propose, build and own generation, subject to state approval. One concrete proposal is a 500 MW utility-owned battery in southern New Jersey. The interview does not say which generating technology Exelon would choose for plants of its own.
What A Planner Takes From It
For anyone who designs or buys plant equipment, the point is the timing mismatch: a project that needs five to seven years is being planned against a market that prices one year at a time. If states do open the door to utility-owned plants, orders for engines, turbines and the equipment around them would come from a buyer with a different risk profile than a merchant developer. That is a possibility, not a forecast, and the interview does not claim it.
The same grid is behind other recent items: PJM's study of a 10 GW gas-backed campus in Ohio and NiSource's 1,100 MW supply deal in Indiana. More on how generating plant serves data centers.
Sources: POWER Magazine
