Four energy threads, 2026 so far, and where each stands

The pattern across all four

I write a short read every week on the energy signals that matter commercially. Since April, four topics kept coming back. Read together, they make one point: in 2026, hardware stopped being the constraint. Batteries are cheap, panels are a small share of installed cost, and turbines and transformers are scarce but well understood. What decided outcomes was a rule or a date:

• whether a market rule pays for what an asset does;
• whether a tariff or contract decides who carries a cost;
• whether a compliance file holds up under a credit buyer's diligence;
• whether a delivery date can be held.

If you sell into any of these markets, the question your buyer is really asking is usually one of those four.

The four threads

Large loads: who pays and who gets connected

In the spring, the fight was over who pays for the wires. By the fall it was over who carries the cost of a late arrival date. FERC's October 9 order rejected the core of PJM's large-load proposal and sent the question of who gets curtailed first back to the states. For now, the cost of being late is priced in contracts, not in a market rule. Watch: PJM's revised backstop filing and the early-December capacity auction.

Storage economics: what actually gets paid for

Storage gets built where a rule pays for speed, duration or availability, and stalls where it doesn't, even with cheap cells. The pushback I kept hearing was about firmness: are storage and renewables firm, or do they lean on gas and imports? That's mostly right, and it points to the same answer. Firmness is what capacity payments reward, and duration mostly isn't accredited yet. Watch: Britain's final long-duration awards and Spain's first capacity auction.

Solar after subsidies: the panel is solved, the paperwork isn't

With modules near commodity prices and US credits now running down to a 2030 edge, solar's margin moved to three places: proving compliance to the credit buyer, delivering power in hours an offtaker will pay for, and getting permitted and connected faster than the next project. Watch: the December 4 import price floors and the first full quarter after the July 4 construction deadline.

Firm power under bottlenecks

With firm capacity and its equipment both booked years out, the market buys on delivery date, not lifetime cost. Buyers who can lock a slot, or own the developer outright, build first. Everyone else pays for the wait through second-tier hardware, older plants kept running longer, or grid costs the largest loads no longer carry. Watch: whether turbine reservations keep converting to orders, and whether federal retirement overrides survive in court.

Five questions to watch

I'll score these in a January update, hits and misses both.

1. Early December 2026: what does PJM's 2029/30 base capacity auction clear at, and does the revised backstop filing allocate costs on updated load forecasts?
2. By December 31, 2026: do Ofgem's final cap-and-floor awards confirm the 16 shortlisted long-duration projects on the minded-to terms?
3. December 4, 2026 onward: do US module prices move toward the new $0.38/W import floor in the first solar market report of 2027 (expected around March)?
4. Late January 2027: does GE Vernova's gas backlog plus reservations reach its guided 130 GW, with conversions still outpacing new reservations?
5. By March 31, 2027: does PJM refile a curtail-first framework, or does a large PJM state set curtailment priority for large loads?

How to read this

Each thread page is a dated snapshot of my own read, not a forecast. It cites my LinkedIn posts by date, and public sources for where things stand. Engagement figures on those pages are attention, not demand. They show which threads people saved and argued with, not what anyone will buy. Every figure was recomputed in October 2026.