Solar's growth lands in ERCOT and MISO; PJM's load goes to gas

The Energy Information Administration's latest Short-Term Energy Outlook has U.S. electricity consumption rising 2% in 2026 and another 2% in 2027 to what the agency calls record levels, with total sales reaching 4,211 billion kilowatt-hours by the end of the forecast. Commercial load — data centers and the manufacturing expansion behind them — does the heavy lifting, up 3.3% this year and 2.7% next and accounting for 63% of the sales increase in 2026 and 56% in 2027.

Generation moves in step: solar grows 21% in 2026 and 18% in 2027, wind 7% and then 5%, natural gas 2% and 1%, and coal generation falls 8% and then 6%. Those are the numbers a sponsor would put on the cover of a teaser; the geography is what decides returns. EIA concentrates the solar additions in ERCOT and MISO — Texas gets 18 billion kWh this year and 20 billion next, the Midwest 13 billion and 11 billion, 31 billion kWh in each year even as the national growth rate decelerates.

PJM tells the other half. The market EIA says accounts for nearly 45% of total U.S. generation growth meets that increase with natural gas in 2026 and with gas, coal and wind in 2027, not solar. The outlook does not say why the solar lands where it lands; interconnection speed, siting economics and state policy all plausibly figure, and EIA takes none of them on. Added solar and added load are not in the same markets: the panels are going into ERCOT and MISO, the demand is showing up in PJM and being served largely by gas. As this publication has argued, grid access is now the underwriting variable, and EIA's market-by-market solar figures read as a ledger of where access has been granted.

Coal cuts both ways inside the same forecast: exports rise against 2025 while domestic demand from the electric power sector falls 8% and then 6%, as gas and renewables take share in the Northwest and MISO. Export and domestic coal are two different trades in these numbers, and neither one is the trade a transition platform is underwriting.

The gap in the outlook is the one capital markets have to fill. EIA forecasts quantities: nothing in the release identifies an owner, an offtake counterparty or a price for the 62 billion kWh of added solar it expects ERCOT and MISO to deliver across the two years. A milestone without a price is a financing event rather than evidence of infrastructure demand, and the sponsors bidding for interconnect position in Texas and the Midwest are paying for a queue, not a revenue line. The nearest place that gets tested is ERCOT's December filing separating queued capacity from real demand in the state's data-center buildout. Until then, the honest reading of a double-digit solar forecast is that it describes supply — and the load growth the industry keeps pricing sits in a market being served by gas.