All Gassed Up: PJM Combines RBP and C&M (++for IPPs) and 2026 AGA Conference Tak

Research evidence excerpt

All Gassed Up: PJM Combines RBP and C&M (++for IPPs) and 2026 AGA Conference Tak

AGA Takeaways

Overall, the AGA conference reinforced for us what has increasingly become the defining theme

across the regulated utility sector: the industry has shifted from a demand adequacy

paradigm toward an infrastructure adequacy paradigm. While AI-related hyperscale demand

continues to dominate investor attention, the more durable investment implication is the sheer

scale of transmission, distribution, generation, and system resiliency investment required to

support an increasingly electrified and latency-sensitive economy. Importantly, management

teams broadly framed current hyperscale announcements as only the “first wave” of demand

growth, with inference, edge computing, industrial electrification, transportation infrastructure,

healthcare, and advanced manufacturing expected to become increasingly important

incremental drivers over time. At the same time, companies generally acknowledged that

execution risk across labor, supply chains, permitting, and generation construction timelines is

becoming a more meaningful differentiator as the sector enters what could ultimately prove to be

a multi-decade infrastructure build cycle

One of the themes from the conference was the growing divergence between utilities

operating within vertically integrated frameworks and those dependent on organized

market structures. Management teams with vertically integrated generation portfolios

consistently highlighted speed-to-power, generation certainty, and long-term planning visibility

as increasingly important competitive advantages for hyperscale customers. Many utilities

emphasized that current data center development conversations are increasingly shifting toward