power — 6 leads

The largest US grid operator fell 6,831 MW short of its reliability target in July and plans to fill the gap with a one-off auction offering 15-year capacity contracts at up to $555/MW-day, open September 30 to October 21, 2026 — the opportunity is in the few developers that already hold turbines, gas and sites, and whose projects turn from merchant bets into contracted cash flow if they clear.

On September 21, 2026 Governor Abbott ordered the Texas environmental regulator to issue no permits to data-center projects until the state's grid and water audits are done, extending an August freeze on grid connections to the air and stormwater permits that behind-the-meter gas campuses need; three days earlier North Carolina refused to let Duke Energy build a turbine next to Amazon's campus because data-center load was 'insufficiently reliable' — The company most exposed is SB Energy, whose amended prospectus filed the same day carries 8.8 GW of contracted capacity in Texas and Ohio, 1.7 GW of Texas pipeline awaiting ERCOT verification, and no mention of the new halt; the value moves toward already-permitted sites, states without moratoria and owners of existing interconnected power.

An executive order has prohibited installing foreign-made grid equipment tied to "covered foreign entities" since August 26, 2026, but no country, company or product has been named yet — the Energy Department opened its consultation on September 9 and must publish the rules by December 24.

Grid batteries and inverters are listed by name, Chinese makers dominate the world's storage cells, and the non-Chinese storage and inverter companies have not repriced.

Elon Musk said SpaceX will cast its own gas-turbine blades because the handful of foundries that can make them are the reason AI data centers cannot get power fast enough, and the biggest listed one lost 7.5% in a day.

The company that just had the shortage confirmed by its largest potential customer got sold as if the shortage were over — and a newly listed competitor with the same bottleneck barely gets covered.

Since August 3, 2026 Texas has refused to approve new data-center grid connections until regulators verify 474 gigawatts of requests — about five times the state's peak demand — and utilities elsewhere that started demanding deposits have seen their pipelines fall by 40-50%.

If the official demand forecast deflates, the companies priced on it and the auctions that set power prices are exposed; the projects that survive the audit become scarcer.

California's legislature has sent the governor two bills putting data centres on their own electricity tariff, thirty states have introduced versions of the same idea, and a federal bill cleared its committee without a single vote against.

The part worth thinking about is not the politics but the consequence: the cheapest way for a very large computing customer to escape all of this is to stop buying grid power and build its own generation.