Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

North American wholesale power markets spent the last week of September and the first days of October in a decidedly structural, rather than weather-driven, posture. Mild shoulder-season conditions across most of the continent kept real-time prices subdued and left capacity-market design as the dominant storyline. The single most consequential action was FERC’s September 29 decision to conditionally approve but suspend PJM’s Reliability Backstop Procurement, which forced PJM to pull the auction it had scheduled to open September 30 and crystallized the fight over who should bear the cost of filling the region’s looming capacity shortfall amid surging data-center load. The same resource-adequacy pressures surfaced elsewhere in parallel, as MISO reversed its approach to allocating planning reserve margin obligations, Ontario’s IESO advanced a marginal-reliability-impact method for capacity accreditation, and ISO New England’s transmission owners absorbed FERC’s reaffirmation of a return-on-equity reduction carrying roughly $1.5 billion in refunds.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/100226_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

For the better part of a decade, virtual power plants occupied an awkward position in the American electricity conversation. Utilities and system operators acknowledged the concept, researchers published optimistic cost curves, and a handful of programs showed that thousands of home batteries could, in principle, behave like a single power plant. Yet the virtual power plant remained something of a promissory note: a resource that performed well in pilots but had not proved it could deliver at the scale and moment the grid genuinely needed it. During a mid-September heat wave, that promissory note was cashed.

To read the full article: 

https://vedeni.energy/the-580-mw-vpp-breakthrough/

Picture the meeting where your company approved its AI budget. Someone put up a slide promising that employees would reclaim hours every week. Everyone nodded. Now look at your team’s calendar, your inbox, and the faces in Monday’s stand-up. Did those hours come back? For many managers, the answer is no—and the numbers suggest their experience is not unusual.

Upwork surveyed 2,500 workers across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada between April 16 and May 5, 2024. Among the 1,250 C-suite leaders surveyed, 96 percent expected AI to boost productivity. Yet 77 percent of full-time employees said AI had added to their workload. Same technology, same companies, opposite experiences. That gap now has a name: the AI productivity paradox. If you manage people—or manage managers—it lands on your desk whether or not you asked for it.

Read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/the-ai-productivity-paradox-why-your-teams-workload-is-growing-not-shrinking/

Two storylines dominated North American power markets during the week, both rooted in the same underlying pressure: surging data-center demand and the question of how the grid will be organized to serve it. In the West, the contest between CAISO's Extended Day-Ahead Market and SPP's Markets+ sharpened as the Bonneville Power Administration held its first day-ahead-market workshop under Administrator Travis Kavulla and signaled a formal reconsideration of its earlier commitment to Markets+, putting EDAM back in serious contention. The move reverberated across the region. The California Public Utilities Commission opened a rulemaking on how the state's investor-owned utilities will participate in the emerging Regional Organization for Western Energy, an Arizona regulator pressed the state's utilities for fresh analysis of their market-choice decisions, and market participants debated openly whether two competing Western markets serve customers better than one.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/092526_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

In the third week of September 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy reached a milestone that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago. With directives issued between September 17 and 19, the agency’s emergency actions under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act pushed into the high forties for the year, affecting roughly seven aging power plants and eleven generating units once scheduled for retirement. A tool written for wartime and historically reserved for true short-term crises has become something closer to a recurring feature of grid operations, reissued on a rhythm that now tracks the calendar more than a specific emergency. The same week the newest orders landed, a federal appeals court delivered the sharpest rebuke yet to the legal theory behind them, setting up a reckoning over how the country manages the retirement of dispatchable capacity. For anyone tracking grid reliability, the coming months will test whether emergency authority can substitute for orderly resource planning, and at what cost.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/emergency-by-extension-section-202c-and-the-u-s-grid/

Utility-sparked wildfires have become one of the largest financial risks in the North American power sector, producing tens of billions of dollars in wildfire liability, a string of credit downgrades, and the 2019 bankruptcy of the nation's largest investor-owned utility. This paper evaluates the full toolkit of utility wildfire mitigation: selective undergrounding power lines, covered conductors and other forms of grid hardening, fast-trip protection settings, the public safety power shutoff, and AI-enabled ignition detection. It weighs the cost, effectiveness, and ratepayer impact of each strategy, examines the changing liability and insurance landscape, including California's Wildfire Fund and the wave of state liability laws enacted since 2020, and proposes a risk-based framework for prioritizing mitigation investment.

Read the White Paper:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Vedeni_Wildfire_Resilient_Grids_White_Paper_2.pdf

Somewhere in the last year, "AI agent" stopped being a phrase for engineers and started appearing in the same sentence as "headcount." Managers who used to worry about staffing a project now find themselves deciding whether a piece of software gets a name, a Slack handle, and a line on the org chart. If that sounds strange, you're not imagining it. It's happening at a scale most leaders haven't caught up with, and the way they handle it over the next year will shape how their teams actually work, not just how their slide decks describe it.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/when-ai-joins-the-team/

An unseasonable mid-September heat wave was the week's defining operational event, pushing temperatures well above normal across the eastern Interconnection and colliding with a compressed autumn maintenance window. PJM issued a Maximum Generation Alert and a Load Management Alert for September 17 and activated demand response to hold reliability, while MISO invoked emergency measures as demand climbed toward the top of its seasonal range with a large share of its fleet offline for maintenance. Real-time prices spiked sharply in PJM's western zones at the peak of the event, and the episode underscored how thin autumn reserve margins become when heat lingers into September. Western and Texas markets, by contrast, saw seasonal loads ease after an early-month heat spell and passed the week without emergencies.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/091826_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

For the better part of a generation, the story of American nuclear power was one of managed decline. Reactors that had run reliably for decades were closing early, undercut by cheap shale gas, punished by energy-only markets that assigned little value to firm, carbon-free capacity, and stranded by a policy environment that rewarded marginal cost over resilience. Between 2013 and 2022, roughly a dozen units went dark, and the industry’s obituary was written so often it began to read like liturgy. This week, that narrative reached its most striking inflection point yet as the Palisades plant in Michigan moved within striking distance of becoming the first permanently closed commercial reactor in United States history to return to service. Palisades is no longer an outlier. It is the vanguard of a broader realignment in which nuclear power for data centers has become a defining commercial and reliability question of the decade, and in which the atom has been recast from stranded asset to strategic scarcity.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/nuclear-powers-ai-moment/

A director I know went from seven direct reports to fourteen over about nine months. Nobody sat her down to discuss it. Two peers left and were not backfilled, a layer above her was removed in a restructuring, and the org chart redrew itself around her one quiet decision at a time. Her title stayed the same. Her compensation stayed the same. Her calendar turned into a wall of thirty-minute blocks with no space between them. When she finally raised it with her own boss, the answer she got was that everyone was carrying more right now.

To read the full article:

https://vedeni.energy/the-great-flattening-what-to-do-when-your-team-quietly-doubles/