Stories You May Have Missed This Week: EV, Charging & Intelligent Electrification Roundup (07/29/26 Edition)

EV Market Signals| Energy & Solar Integration | Charging Tech & Innovation | Electrification Roundup

July 28, 2026•8 min read

Editor's Read

This was the week the response caught up to the crisis. Last week brought the alarms; this week brought the countermeasures. PJM scheduled an emergency auction to buy its way out of a shortfall, a $375 million merger began building a platform to feed the demand, and Costco simply walked its warehouses off the grid. The pattern is unusually clean. The institutions that run the grid are openly admitting they cannot keep pace, and the owners who come through this with their value intact are the ones building their own power. That is the thesis of this publication, and this week it was executed at the scale of a Fortune 50 company and a $375 million deal.

By Keith Reynolds | Publisher & Editor, ChargedUp!

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Grid Stress, Storms and Resilience Economics

1. Older Power Plants Keep Failing as the Grid Watchdog's Alarm Stays Live

Last week's reliability report found conventional power plants failing unexpectedly 9.2 percent of the time, above the usual 7 to 8 percent, with coal at 14.1 percent, and the watchdog issued its highest-level alert. Read alongside PJM's new emergency auction, the two main authorities over the grid are sending the same message: supply is struggling to keep up, and a building's own backup power is worth more for it.

2. PJM Rejects Shutting Off Data Centers, Choosing a Public Registry Instead

PJM stakeholders rejected every proposal that would let the grid operator curtail large customers during a shortage, opting instead to build a public registry of large loads that shows each state where the big demand sits. The burden of managing that demand shifts to state regulators and local planners, who now get standardized data they have never had.

3. FERC Questions Whether PJM Has Grown Too Big to Govern

The chairman of federal energy regulators has openly questioned whether PJM can be governed effectively across 13 states with very different politics and power mixes, and the commission held a July conference on possible reforms. Structural uncertainty at the region's grid operator adds risk to any long-horizon energy project in the footprint.

Electrification Economics at the Property Level

4. Who Pays for PJM's Emergency Power Becomes a State-by-State Decision

The cost of PJM's backstop auction will be spread across the utilities serving each area, with each state deciding how it lands on different kinds of customers. Where states route the cost to the large loads that caused it, other ratepayers are shielded; where they do not, commercial bills absorb it. The outcome is a direct variable in the commercial power baseline.

5. Xcel Pitches a Colorado Tariff to Pull Big Commercial Customers Through Faster

Xcel Energy proposed a Colorado tariff, modeled on a framework Google helped design, aimed at streamlining costs and speeding grid connections for large, power-hungry commercial customers. Tariff design is becoming the tool that decides which large projects get power and how quickly, and it is a template other states will study.

6. Commercial Electricity Prices Stay 5.8 Percent Above a Year Ago

The latest federal figures put average commercial electricity prices up 5.8 percent from a year earlier, with some states far higher. This is the number that lands on a building's operating statement, and it keeps climbing on grid strain rather than on the swings in oil that dominate the headlines.

Solar, Storage and VPPs

7. Battery Storage Costs Hit a Record Low Globally, but Run Higher in the U.S.

The global benchmark cost of a four-hour battery storage project fell 27 percent in a year to a record low, driven by manufacturing scale and competition, even as U.S. costs ran 56 to 69 percent higher because of tariffs and supply rules. The split defines both the opportunity and the constraint for an owner: the technology is getting cheaper, but domestic timing and sourcing matter more than ever.

8. A Sunrun Pilot Turns Home Batteries Into a Data Center's Power Supply

A home-solar company is aggregating thousands of residential solar-and-battery systems into a coordinated resource it can sell to data centers, part of a push to have big power users lean on distributed energy rather than new fossil plants. The model reframes behind-the-meter batteries as a wholesale resource, opening a revenue path for owners whose buildings can host storage.

9. Google Locks Up the Output of the Largest U.S. Solar-and-Battery Project

Google agreed to buy all the power from a project adding 2.5 gigawatts of solar and 2.9 gigawatts of battery storage rather than draw it from the general grid. When the biggest users contract entire clean-energy projects, less is left for everyone else, which is one more reason a building benefits from generating its own.

Policy and Market Rules

10. A Federal-State Consensus Forms Around Making Data Centers Pay Their Own Way

PJM's cost-allocation plan follows principles, endorsed by the White House, all 13 PJM-state governors, and data centers themselves, that new large loads should bear the costs they create. That bipartisan consensus is the policy tailwind behind the wave of state bills creating special rate classes for big power users.

11. More Than 300 Data Center Bills Move Through Statehouses

Lawmakers have filed over 300 data center bills across more than 30 states this year, with at least 18 states creating separate rules requiring large users to pay their own connection and upgrade costs. Rate rules are being rewritten in dozens of places at once, so a property's electricity outlook now depends heavily on which state it sits in.

12. The Large-Load Registry Hands States a New Planning Instrument

PJM will maintain a public registry identifying large loads and their reliability impact by zone and state, giving regulators a standardized picture they have never had. For planners, it is the first clear map of where the biggest demand sits, and it will shape siting and rate decisions for years.

Local Governance and Federal Policy

13. Managing Big Loads Shifts to the States by Design

Because PJM cannot assign retail costs to individual data centers, the board wrote that state action is essential, deliberately handing states the decision on how large-load costs land. That puts local regulators and planners at the center of the buildout, and makes jurisdiction-level diligence mandatory for any large project.

14. Local Moratoriums Keep Spreading as Entitlement Risk Compounds

The running national tally of local pauses, from Denver to Ypsilanti to Prince George's County, and roughly $64 billion in projects blocked or delayed, remains the ground-level reality. Site selection now turns on municipal calendars as much as on power availability, a risk no title search reveals.

15. Xcel's Colorado Tariff Doubles as a Governance Experiment

Beyond allocating costs, the Xcel proposal tests whether a streamlined tariff can move large commercial customers through the connection queue faster than the standard process. If it works, it becomes a governance template other states copy to attract investment while protecting existing ratepayers.

EV Charging in Real Places

16. Off-Grid Depots Bypass the Connection Queue Entirely

Off-grid solar-and-battery microgrids are powering electric truck fleets at distribution centers without any utility tie-in, avoiding the multi-year wait that stalls fleet electrification. For logistics and industrial owners, off-grid charging is now a proven way to power a depot on schedule rather than waiting years for a service upgrade.

17. Shrinking New-Car Incentives Push Charging Value Toward Used and Workplace Sites

A July forecast shows new EV purchase incentives falling about $759 to roughly $10,092 per vehicle, contributing to a 3.3 percentage point drop in EV share of new sales. As subsidies thin, the charging demand that holds up is at the apartments, workplaces, and retail sites where used and value buyers park.

EV Market Signals

18. New EV Sales Fell Nearly 24 Percent in the First Half, but the Mix Is Re-Sorting

First-half new EV sales fell 23.8 percent year over year, improving to a 20.5 percent decline in the second quarter, with Toyota more than doubling its EV sales on an updated model even as others fell. The market is not collapsing so much as re-sorting by brand, which changes which properties actually see charging demand.

19. Global EV Growth Cools to 21 Percent as the U.S. Lags Europe

Global EV sales rose 21 percent in July, the slowest pace since January, with North America up just 10 percent against Europe's 48 percent. The U.S. is the laggard, which means domestic charging demand should be underwritten on local adoption rather than global growth headlines.

Data Center Demand and Innovation

21. Workhorse Enters the Mobile AI Data Center Market With Battery-Backed Containers

Industrial tech firm Workhorse Group announced containerized mobile AI data centers with integrated liquid cooling and backup battery power for commercial delivery. Mobile, self-powered data infrastructure is a new asset class that could land on industrial and commercial sites without a traditional grid connection, and it is worth watching as a demand source and a tenant type.

22. The 70-Gigawatt Forecast Reframes the Entire PJM Footprint

PJM's projection of 70 gigawatts of new large-load demand by 2038 is the figure behind the emergency auction, the registry, and the rate fights. For any owner across 13 states, it is the single number that explains why power is getting scarcer and more expensive, and why owning some of your own is worth more each year.

Keith Reynolds

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