Vedeni Energy’s Deep Dive

Here's the thing about the people who worry you least. They show up. They hit their numbers. They don't slam the laptop shut at 5:01 or vent in the all-hands. And that steadiness is exactly why you can miss what's happening to them. The person who is struggling in a way you can measure is easy to help. The one who is struggling quietly, behind a wall of decent output, is the one you won't notice until they've already checked out or handed in notice. There is a name for that slow, hidden erosion now, and it stuck because it fit what a lot of managers were already seeing: quiet cracking. If you run a team, or you run the people who run teams, this is the workplace story worth your attention this year, because it lives inside your best performers and your calmest-looking groups.

North American wholesale power markets were shaped this week less by the coasts than by a heat dome parked over the central United States and the Desert Southwest, and by the emergency and market-design responses it provoked. The most striking action came on July 26, when the U.S. Department of Energy invoked Federal Power Act Section 202(c) to issue an emergency order authorizing the Southwest Power Pool to dispatch specified units and tap backup and behind-the-meter generation ahead of a Level 3 energy emergency, an order that runs through August 3. Arizona utilities that transact through the Western Energy Imbalance Market set all-time peak-demand records on July 25 as Phoenix reached 117 degrees, with Salt River Project peaking near 9,072 MW and Arizona Public Service near 9,053 MW. ERCOT, meanwhile, moved through a record weekly-average load without issuing conservation appeals, helped by record solar output and heavy battery discharge, while California and the Northeast saw comparatively ordinary conditions as the most acute heat stayed inland.

To read the full report:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/073126_Weekly_Market_Report.pdf

The largest power market in the United States has spent the better part of two years trying to reconcile an immovable object with an unstoppable force. The immovable object is a transmission grid whose ability to add firm generation is constrained by long interconnection queues, supply-chain delays, and the slow arithmetic of building large machines. The unstoppable force is the artificial-intelligence build-out, which has made data centers the fastest-growing category of electricity demand the country has seen in a generation.

North America has entered a decisive decade for resource adequacy. NERC's most recent assessments warn that a growing share of the continent faces elevated reliability risk as electricity demand accelerates faster than dispatchable supply is added and thermal generators continue to retire. The central problem is no longer how much nameplate capacity exists, but how much firm, on-demand capability the system can count on at the moment of peak need especially during wide-area winter cold. This paper examines how capacity accreditation methodologies and capacity markets are being reformed to value a resource's true reliability contribution, the growing role of storage and demand-side resources, and the planning and market-design changes needed to close a widening gap between projected demand and available firm supply.

To read the full White Paper:

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/072926-Resource_Adequacy_Gap_White_Paper_final-copy.pdf

Here is something that should bother anyone who runs a team: companies spent the past two years pouring money into artificial intelligence, handing out tools, and rewriting job descriptions around them. After all that, the number that measures whether people actually care about their work went down. Not sideways. Down. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report puts global employee engagement at 20 percent for 2025, the second straight year of decline and the lowest reading since 2020. The tools arrived, and the mood got worse. If you run a team, that gap between spending and sentiment is yours to solve, and it turns out you hold more of the controls than the headlines suggest.

Two developments framed the week across North American wholesale power markets, and both traced back to the same underlying pressures of extreme summer heat and surging large-load demand. A Central-U.S. heat wave pushed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to consecutive all-time demand records, culminating in an unofficial peak near 91,308 MW on July 23, roughly 5,800 MW above the prior 2023 mark, while the grid held without conservation appeals as a record battery and solar fleet carried the evening net peak. Farther north, the same heat drove Southwest Power Pool's newly expanded West Balancing Authority Area into a Level 3 Energy Emergency Alert on July 20 after several generators tripped offline amid low wind output, prompting the U.S. Department of Energy to issue a Federal Power Act Section 202(c) emergency order authorizing SPP to dispatch reserve resources as needed through July 21. No rolling outages were ordered in either footprint, but the back-to-back events underscored how thin operating margins have become in the fast-growing central interior of the continent.

The summer of 2026 has become a stress test the American electric system was not designed to pass gracefully. Across the eastern seaboard and deep into Texas, successive heat domes have pushed regional grids to demand levels planners once treated as distant, once-in-a-generation outliers. In early July, the PJM Interconnection—the largest grid operator in North America, serving roughly 67 million people from the Mid-Atlantic to the edge of the Midwest—came within reach of its all-time consumption record.

 Weeks later, in the third week of July, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas shattered its own peak, drawing more than ninety gigawatts of load in a single afternoon. These were not isolated weather events. They were the visible surface of a deeper structural shift: record electricity demand is being driven not only by hotter summers but also by a new and voracious class of consumer—the hyperscale data center. Understanding what happened this summer, and why federal regulators reached for emergency authorities they rarely invoke, is essential to understanding where grid reliability is headed for the rest of the decade.

Picture your team right now. Attrition is down. The people you worried about losing last year are still at their desks. On paper, that looks like a win. Turnover costs money, and a stable roster makes planning easier. But sit with it one second longer, and a second picture appears. Some of those people are not staying because they want to be there. They are staying because the door out looks frightening, and they have decided the safest move is no move at all. That is job hugging, and it may be the workforce story of 2026.

When PJM Interconnection released the results of its latest capacity auction on July 14, 2026, the headline number looked almost reassuring. At $325 per megawatt-day, the clearing price for the 2028/2029 delivery year came in a few dollars below the $329.17 that cleared the two prior auctions. For anyone reading only the top line, the market appeared to be cooling. It was not. The price landed where it did because a regulator-imposed ceiling stopped it from rising higher — for the third consecutive time. Strip away the cap and the same auction would have cleared at roughly $555 per megawatt-day across the footprint, and closer to $777 in the Chicago-area ComEd zone. The story of PJM’s 2026 capacity auction is not one of prices retreating. It is the story of a market pressed so firmly against its own guardrail that the guardrail has become the price.

Read the article at 

https://vedeni.energy/pjms-capacity-cap-and-the-new-economics-of-grid-scarcity/

The modern electric grid is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Across the United States and around the world, the rapid buildout of wind and solar generation is reshaping not only the composition of the resource stack but also the operational and planning requirements that keep electricity flowing reliably. In the U.S., installed utility-scale solar capacity has grown from negligible levels a decade ago to more than 150 gigawatts today, while wind capacity exceeds 145 gigawatts—together representing a substantial and rapidly expanding share of national generation. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's (NERC) 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment projects that more than 122,000 megawatts of conventional dispatchable generation will retire over the next ten years, as variable, weather-dependent wind and solar resources dominate new capacity additions.

Read the full white paper at

https://vedeni.energy/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/071626-Advanced-Forecasting-for-Renewable-Dominated-Power-Systems.pdf