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PANDORA’S BOX
EVERYTHING GOT OUT. THE HOPE IS AT THE BOTTOM.
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THE ONE-WAY DOOR
Order A Turbine Today And It Arrives In 2031
Money for the buildout moves at the speed of a signature. The machines that make its electricity move at the speed of a foundry.
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The queue is the whole story. Order a heavy-duty gas turbine from GE Vernova this month and it arrives in 2031. That is not a forecast. Scott Strazik told analysts on the twenty second of July that reservations for 2031 are open. More than half of that year will be sold by the end of this one.
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Goldman Sachs put numbers on the other side in May. American data centers drew thirty one gigawatts last year and forty one this year. The 2027 plan calls for adding thirty six point three gigawatts in a single year. Everything GE Vernova builds worldwide, for every customer, is about twenty.
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Add the other two and it still does not close. Siemens carries a sixty nine gigawatt backlog and quotes three years or more. Mitsubishi is booking deliveries for 2028 through 2030 and says it is being selective. Wood Mackenzie puts world manufacturing capacity at sixty to seventy gigawatts a year against about a hundred ten in orders. The gap is the industry.
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525 MEGAWATTS
OF NEW SUPPLY, AT THE MAXIMUM LEGAL PRICE
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PJM cleared its July auction at the price cap for the third year running, and still finished six thousand eight hundred megawatts below its own reliability requirement. |
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FROM OUTSIDE THE BOX
Elon Musk did it again! After self-driving cars…
Reusable rockets that land themselves…
And brain chips that let paralyzed people control computers with their minds…
A new form of AI so powerful he called it an “infinite money glitch.”
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Gas is not the bottleneck. Henry Hub sat near two dollars eighty in mid August, which is ordinary. It is castings and people. Hot section blades come from a thin bench of specialist foundries. The welders who assemble these machines were laid off a decade ago and never replaced. That bench does not come back on a purchase order.
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So the price moved instead. A combined cycle project averaged two thousand one hundred fifty seven dollars per kilowatt last year, against under fifteen hundred in 2023. GE Vernova priced its first half orders more than twenty percent above the fourth quarter. Its free cash flow this year already beats all of 2025.
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We graded this SEALED. It is a word we rarely use. The turbines running data centers in 2027 were ordered in 2023 and 2024. Nothing signed this month changes American generating capacity before about 2030. What is still open is demand, not supply. Demand is the part that can be cancelled.
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EVERY LEAD PASSES BEFORE IT RUNS
The One-Way-Door Test
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Can it be undone?
You cannot manufacture time. The turbines for 2027 were ordered in 2023, and the foundries and the welders are a decade of hiring away.
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Who is already repositioning?
GE Vernova is taking paid deposits on 2031 slots and booked six point four billion in working capital from them. Siemens and Mitsubishi both say they are being selective.
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What does being late cost?
PJM has proposed a one time backstop for about fifteen gigawatts, with bilateral contracts starting next month. Its July auction already showed what the market can supply.
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THE MOVE · WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME
Read the capacity line on your electricity bill, not the total. If you sit inside PJM territory, which runs from Illinois across to New Jersey and Virginia, the 2028 and 2029 delivery years already cleared at the legal maximum. That number is contracted and it lands on your bill whatever happens next. If you are picking a fixed rate plan this autumn, price it against the 2029 figure rather than this year’s.
If the PJM backstop fills a real share of that fifteen gigawatts by the March auction, the supply side found an answer we did not see, and this reading weakens. We will say so. |
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ALSO GOT LOOSE TODAY
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Canada will impose dollar for dollar tariffs on American goods from the eighth of September after talks collapsed on Friday night. Fifty percent duties on some Canadian exports are already live. |
MONEY |
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Nvidia has warned large customers that servers built around its chips could cost more than fifteen percent extra. The scarcity is moving down the chain, not up it. |
MACHINES |
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A new survey finds a five hundred dollar surprise expense is enough to knock working households off their retirement plans. That is the buffer under all of this. |
WORK |
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WHAT’S LEFT AT THE BOTTOM
The bench got emptied by a decision, not by a law of nature. Welders and foundry hands take years to train, not decades, and the pay is already climbing to prove it. Somebody is going to take that work. WE WATCH THE BOX.
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