If you hired three painters, took all three bids, and then paid every one of them the highest price, you would fire your contractor.

That is close to how much of America’s wholesale electricity market works.

Regional grid operators like PJM, serving 64 million people, accept the lowest offers needed to meet demand. But they do not pay each generator what it bid. Every cleared generator gets paid the price set by the last and most expensive required seller.

Economists call it uniform pricing. I call it take-and-pay.

Either way, your family pays the bill.

PJM’s capacity price was $28.92 per megawatt-day for 2024/25. It jumped to $269.92 for 2025/26, then $329.17, then $333.44. The latest auction cleared at $325 and hit the price cap for the third year running, still short of PJM’s own reliability target.

Families and factories did not start using nine times more electricity. The auction did.

Now data centers are pouring gasoline on that fire.

An AI campus is not an ordinary factory. One site can draw as much power as a small city, around the clock. PJM’s forecasts trace most of its demand growth to these loads, and PJM’s independent market monitor says data centers drove $6.3 billion of the cost of the latest auction.

Uniform pricing multiplies the damage. When the last and priciest megawatt sets the price for everyone, a thin shortage reprices the whole market. A plant that offered power cheaply collects the same check as the expensive unit that was actually needed.

That works on an economist’s blackboard. It works considerably less well on a retiree’s electric bill.

Defenders say pay-as-bid would simply make generators bid higher. Fine. Then enforce market power rules, require honest bidding, and make subsidies visible in the offer. Wind and solar that bid near zero because taxpayers already paid should not pocket the same clearing price as the gas or nuclear plant keeping the lights on at 7 p.m. in January.

Every other competitive market rewards the supplier who offers the better price. Electricity should not be the exception, as grid operators prefer a single, tidy number.

Data centers raise a second question: who pays for the power they need?

If a hyperscaler wants 500 megawatts of firm electricity next year, existing customers should not be conscripted to finance the plants, wires, and reserves that serve it. A machine shop in Ohio and a family in an apartment outside Chicago never asked for that load.

The answer is simple. Bring your own power.

New large loads should contract for or build the firm generation that serves them, behind the meter, co-located, or through bilateral deals that do not reprice everyone else’s electricity. Developers are already doing it, with tens of gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation planned, because the interconnection queue is slow and the public grid was never meant to be a free option.

PJM’s scramble for backstop auctions, higher price caps, and talk of curtailing large loads is an admission that the socialized model cannot absorb this growth. The fix is not smearing another multibillion-dollar procurement across every meter in 13 states.

Four reforms would do it.

Pay generators the price they bid, not the highest price accepted. Require offers to reflect true costs after subsidies. Value capacity by whether the power actually shows up when people need it, not by nameplate. And require new large loads to bring matching firm supply or pay the full incremental cost of serving them.

None of this is anti-AI. America should win the AI race, and that takes more electricity from natural gas, nuclear, coal and hydro. But AI companies should compete for power the way they compete for chips, land and engineers. Paying their own way.

What we do not need is a market rule that turns every shortage into a jackpot for sellers and a bigger bill for everyone else.

Stop paying the jackpot. Pay the bid. If you want the power, bring the power.

FRANK LASEE | Truth in Energy and Climate