American Companies Are Closing the Grid Capacity Gap
Your electricity bill has two halves. One pays for the power itself. One pays to move that power through wires to your house. The first half is what jumped this year, and the reason traces back to a single auction most households have never heard of.
Here is what happened, what it costs a family, and what American companies are building in response.
An Auction You Never See Sets Part of Your Electric Bill
The electric grid across thirteen states and the District of Columbia is coordinated by an organization called PJM Interconnection. It serves 67 million people, including everyone in northern Illinois.
What is a capacity auction?
A capacity auction is how the grid operator pays power plants to promise they will be available on the hottest and coldest days of a future year. It works like a reservation. The grid operator buys the promise years ahead so the power exists when everyone turns on the air conditioning at the same time.
On July 14, 2026, PJM announced the results of its auction for the 2028 to 2029 period. It secured 138,318 megawatts of capacity. That came up 6,831 megawatts short of what PJM's own reliability standard requires. Prices hit the federally approved ceiling for the third auction in a row. PJM has said it will ask federal regulators for permission to run a special backup purchase in September to help close the gap.
Why did the grid come up short?
Demand grew faster than supply. PJM's independent market monitor found that data centers accounted for 46.2 percent of the demand increase across the last four auctions, with the rest coming from electrification and general economic growth.
Supply barely moved. That latest auction brought in 774 megawatts of new generation and upgrades. Total capacity rose by 371 megawatts compared with the year before. A grid serving 67 million people added roughly the output of one mid-sized power plant while demand climbed by multiples of that.
The Shortfall Arrives at Your House as a Supply Charge
When capacity costs more, that cost passes through to households. The Citizens Utility Board, Illinois's consumer watchdog on utility matters, reports that supply prices for ComEd and Ameren Illinois customers rose roughly 50 percent starting in the summer of 2025.
What is the "price to compare" on my electric bill?
The price to compare is the per kilowatt hour rate you pay for electricity supply from your utility's default service. Illinois publishes it publicly through the Illinois Commerce Commission, and it is the number to use when weighing any other offer.
ComEd's summer price to compare reached 10.399 cents per kilowatt hour effective June 1, 2026. To make that concrete: a household using 1,000 kilowatt hours in a month pays about $104 for supply alone at that rate, before delivery charges, fixed monthly fees, and taxes. Most homes use somewhat less than 1,000 kilowatt hours, so treat that as a round benchmark and scale it against your own usage, which appears on your bill.
That single line item is the clearest measure of what a capacity shortfall costs an ordinary family.
American Companies Are Answering at Two Very Different Scales
Two responses are underway in the same Illinois market, from two companies that could hardly look more different from each other.
The utility building the backbone
Exelon, the Chicago-based parent company of ComEd, has committed $41.3 billion in capital spending from 2026 through 2029, with roughly $10 billion of that scheduled for 2026 alone. This is transmission lines, substations, distribution equipment, and large-scale battery storage.
The Illinois piece is filed and waiting. ComEd's grid plan before the Illinois Commerce Commission, Docket 26-0047, proposes $15.3 billion of investment from 2028 through 2031. An order is expected by December 15, 2026.
Exelon told investors on July 30 that its reliability performance saved customers an estimated $1 billion in avoided outage costs during 2025, and that annual customer interruptions have dropped by nearly 2 million since 2021.
The startup putting a battery in the backyard
Base Power, founded in Austin in 2023, launched across Chicagoland on June 24, 2026. It builds its own batteries in its own factory, has raised more than $1 billion, and powers more than 20,000 homes in Texas.
The first 2,000 Illinois customers receive a 40 kilowatt hour whole-home backup battery for a $95 installation fee, with no ongoing battery charges. Later customers pay $295. Canary Media reported that a comparable backup-capable home battery normally runs $10,000 or more.
How does a home battery lower a monthly bill?
The battery charges overnight when electricity is cheap and discharges during the late-afternoon and evening hours when the grid strains and power costs the most. The company sells that stored power into the wholesale market and earns revenue from helping stabilize the grid. That revenue funds the hardware, which is how the equipment reaches a household for $95.
Base Power is licensed in Illinois as an Alternative Retail Electric Supplier and prices customer supply at least 25 percent below ComEd's published price to compare. At the 1,000 kilowatt hour benchmark above, a 25 percent reduction on the supply portion works out to roughly $26 a month. The company is also opening a warehouse in Bloomingdale with about 50 local jobs attached.
Every megawatt these home batteries deliver during peak hours is a megawatt PJM does not have to buy at the price ceiling. The household saves, and every other customer on the grid benefits from the reduced strain.
Your City Hall Decides How Fast Any of This Reaches You
Base Power's chief executive told the Chicago Tribune that the company can currently serve about a third of the Chicago market. Municipal permitting requirements account for the gap. The company is expanding one community at a time.
How does local permitting affect what I pay?
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a federal research lab, studied more than 200,000 residential energy projects and found that how long a project takes depends heavily on which town it is in.
Communities using an automated permitting system called SolarAPP+, which also handles battery storage, cut the median time from application to passed inspection by 31 percent. Review time fell from as many as 20 business days to zero. Those same projects were about 29 percent less likely to fail inspection.
The cost lands on households. NREL's survey of installers found that many either skip communities with slow permitting entirely or charge a price premium of 10 to 20 percent to work there. A family in a slow-permitting town waits longer and pays more for the same equipment installed by the same crew.
Safety is doing none of that work. The 29 percent improvement in inspection pass rates points the other direction: standardized automated review is producing safer installations. The delay is paperwork.
What You Can Actually Do About This
Four things are within reach of an ordinary household.
Find the supply line on your bill. Separate the supply charge from the delivery charge. Supply is the part that moved this year, and it is the part you have options on.
Look up your published price to compare. Illinois posts it through the Illinois Commerce Commission at plugin.illinois.gov, along with competing supplier offers. Any offer worth considering has to beat that published number, and the comparison is public and free to run.
Ask your town or city about permitting. Building departments answer this question. Ask whether the town uses automated permitting for residential energy equipment and what the current review timeline is. The answer determines what is available to you and what it costs.
Watch Docket 26-0047. The Illinois Commerce Commission proceeding on ComEd's grid plan is public, and the order is due by December 15, 2026. Commission proceedings accept public comment. Decisions of this size get made in rooms that are open, and attendance is thin.
The Capital Is Committed and the Factories Exist
A utility spending $41.3 billion over four years and a three-year-old company shipping batteries out of an Austin factory are working the same problem from opposite ends. One builds the transmission backbone a thirteen-state grid requires. One reaches the sump pump in a single basement. Both take enormous upfront capital, patient balance sheets, and the manufacturing capacity to build at volume. Both are American companies.
PJM has published the shortfall. The money is committed. The factories are running. Standardizing permitting review, deciding well-documented grid plans on schedule, and letting home batteries compete in wholesale markets are the steps that turn committed capital into delivered electricity and lower bills.
Every month of administrative delay is another month of capped auctions and higher supply charges. The build is ready.