NEW YORK, March 12 (Reuters) - Energy costs in PJM

Interconnection rose by about 50% in 2025, compared to a year

earlier, as the largest U.S. grid struggled to keep up with

power demands from data centers, according to a report by PJM's

independent watchdog on Thursday.

Rising data center demand, both current and forecast for the

years ahead, is creating an urgent affordability problem in PJM,

according to the annual report by Monitoring Analytics, which

acts as PJM's independent market monitor.

* In 2025, the real-time load-weighted average power price

in PJM - a measure that reflects what power typically costs when

people are actually using it the most - rose from about $34 to

$51 per megawatt-hour.

* PJM covers 13 states in the Mid-Atlantic and Northwest

U.S., including the world's biggest data center hub in northern

Virginia. Prices in the market affect the power bills of about

one in five Americans.

* Federal energy regulators and PJM, which covers 13 states

that include the world's biggest data center hub, are scrambling

to find ways to manage power demand brought by Silicon Valley's

quickly proliferating data centers.

* Monitoring Analytics, in the report, supported the

increasingly popular notion that data centers bring their own

electricity supplies to the market instead of using up existing

resources on the grid.

* PJM's method for managing that data center load should

ensure that costs to supply the server warehouses should not

fall on the public, the independent market monitor said.

* Up until recently, energy-intensive data centers connected

easily to the PJM grid, but limited power supplies from existing

power plants have slowed that ability.

* Last year, power generation from coal

electricity-generating units increased 19% and generation from

oil units jumped by 30 percent. Electricity generated from wind,

meanwhile, grew by 2.5% and solar surged by 41 percent.