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Feb 23, 2026 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
In its latest earnings report, the utility said that it now expects at least 10GW of data center load to be signed under Electricity Service Agreements (ESA) by the end of Q1. Vincent Sorgi, president of PPL, said during the call that he believes “ all of the 25.2GW of projects have a high probability of completion.”
Sorgi also said that all of the ESAs “include strong customer protections, such as prepayments and credit support, as well as minimum load requirements for data center customers to pay approximately 80 percent of forecasted load until the costs incurred to extend service are fully recovered.”
During the earnings call, the utility also referenced concerns about long-term affordability for ratepayers across the PJM Interconnection market, which has seen rising prices tied to data center growth.
“With the scale of data center growth we are seeing, we absolutely need to build new reliable generation to meet that demand,” said Sorgi. “The recent call by President Trump and the state governors in PJM for an emergency auction to spur construction of generation, that is a clear acknowledgment of what we have been saying for years.”
The utility said that if the auction were to come to fruition, it could produce around 6-7GW of new power generation. However, Sorgi said that this “would not address the expected data center demand in PPL Electric’s service territory, let alone data center demand across all of PJM. What the auction does signal, however, is increased pressure on data centers to bring their own generation to market or at least pay for the new generation required to power their data centers.”
