Old Plants, New Tricks: AI Is Keeping 'Peaker' Units Alive
Retirement plans are being shelved across PJM as data centers, miners, and AI workloads force grids to squeeze every last megawatt from existing capacity
For years, peaker plants were treated like that dusty backup generator in the basement — something you hope never has to turn on, and definitely something you plan to replace someday. Lately, though, the grid has been reaching for that switch a lot more often.
A recent Reuters deep dive put numbers around what many power markets are now quietly acknowledging: retirement plans are being torn up. In the footprint of PJM Interconnection, about 60% of oil, gas and coal plants that were supposed to shut down have delayed or canceled those plans this year. Most of them are peakers — older units designed to run only during brief spikes in demand.
What changed? Data centers. As AI-driven load piled into PJM, power prices during peak periods jumped, and suddenly these rarely used plants looked less like liabilities and more like insurance policies that actually pay. Reuters highlighted Chicago’s Fisk plant, where NRG Energy reversed course on a planned shutdown after concluding there was now an economic case to keep its eight oil-fired units running. Across PJM, 11 of the 13 plants that avoided retirement this year were peakers.
This lines up neatly with what’s happening in Texas. ERCOT is staring at an avalanche of large load requests, overwhelmingly from data centers chasing AI growth. The sheer scale of those applications dwarfs what the grid can serve in the near term, forcing operators to squeeze more out of existing infrastructure while new generation and transmission crawl through multi-year timelines.
That same power-market gravity is pulling bitcoin miners beyond Texas. Cipher Mining recently made its first move outside ERCOT with a 200-megawatt site in Ohio, plugging directly into PJM. Bitfarms is already there as well, following its acquisition of Stronghold’s power and infrastructure assets in Pennsylvania — a deal that gave Bitfarms a foothold in PJM alongside generation capacity, not just grid access.
Step back, and the message from Reuters’ analysis is pretty blunt. The grid is keeping the old stuff around because it has to. Peaker plants may only generate a small slice of U.S. electricity in a typical year, but they represent a big pool of capacity that can be switched on when things get tight — and right now, things are very tight.
None of this comes without trade-offs. These units are older, dirtier, and often located in communities that have already spent decades pushing back against industrial pollution. But until new power, transmission, and storage actually show up, grid operators are signaling that every available megawatt matters.
For bitcoin miners and data center operators alike, that’s the backdrop for today’s power scramble: a system leaning harder on its “emergency” buttons, and discovering they’re no longer just for emergencies.
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