RTO Governance in the Age of AI

North America's electric grid is governed by institutions built for a slower era. As AI-driven data centers arrive in months while infrastructure takes years—and capacity market prices climb more than tenfold—the binding constraint on reliability is increasingly not engineering alone. It is institutional decision speed.

Using PJM Interconnection—the operator of the grid serving 67 million people—as its central case study, while examining developments across North American electricity markets, this book explores how governance structures, market design, and institutional incentives shape reliability, affordability, and investment. It identifies which grid functions require independent regional coordination, which can be delegated to markets or other institutions, and why governance is not administrative overhead but critical infrastructure whose throughput, transparency, and independence can be measured, compared, and improved.

Drawing on public governance records, FERC proceedings, reliability standards, market data, and emerging regional initiatives, this book offers regulators, policymakers, utility leaders, grid operators, investors, technology executives, researchers, and ratepayers a framework for preparing North American electricity markets for AI data centers and software-defined operations. The governance decisions made today will determine not only how the grid evolves, but how quickly North America can adapt to the challenges before us.