PJM Base Residual Auction Explained: Calendar, Results & 2026/27 Prices

PJM Base Residual Auction Explained: Calendar, Results & 2026/27 Prices

PJM's Base Residual Auction (BRA) is the annual, forward capacity procurement that sets what generators are paid to guarantee they'll be available years before delivery begins. The 2026/27 delivery year, running June 2026 through May 2027, cleared at the price cap of $329.17 per megawatt-day across the entire RTO, up from $269.92 the year before and a fraction of the $28.92 cleared just two delivery years earlier. PJM has since run the 2027/28 and 2028/29 auctions, both of which also cleared at their respective caps. Noreva.ai tracks these clearing results and builds forward capacity price curves that bridge the gaps between auctions.

How the Base Residual Auction actually works

PJM doesn't sell electricity in the BRA. It sells the obligation to be available. Generators, demand response and imports offer capacity into a single-round, sealed-bid auction, and those offers clear against a downward-sloping demand curve known as the Variable Resource Requirement (VRR) curve. The VRR curve isn't a fixed target; it lets PJM accept slightly more or less capacity than its Installed Reserve Margin (IRM) if the price justifies it, which is why clearing prices can move sharply between auctions even when the underlying supply and demand shift only modestly.

Each BRA procures capacity for a single delivery year, priced in dollars per megawatt-day of Unforced Capacity, or UCAP, which discounts each resource's nameplate rating by its historical or Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) derate. A wind farm and a combined-cycle gas plant with identical nameplate capacity clear very different UCAP volumes because their contribution to reliability differs. Most of the RTO clears at a single system-wide price, but Locational Deliverability Areas (LDAs) such as BGE, Dominion, EMAAC and MAAC can clear separately when transmission constraints trap capacity inside a sub-region, which is exactly what happened in the 2025/26 auction.

This auction mechanism sits inside the wider landscape of US Capacity Markets, where each RTO and ISO runs its own resource adequacy construct on its own calendar. PJM's design is the largest by procured megawatts and the one most closely watched because of its size and its recent volatility.

The PJM capacity auction calendar: catching up, then normalizing

The BRA was designed to run three years ahead of the delivery year it covers, giving generators enough lead time to build, retire or mothball plants in response to price signals. That cadence broke down after 2019, when a Minimum Offer Price Rule (MOPR) dispute at FERC froze the auction schedule for roughly two years. PJM has spent 2024 through 2026 running a compressed sequence of auctions to work back onto the three-year-forward track, which is why three separate BRAs have now cleared within about twelve months of each other:

• 2025/26 delivery year: results announced July 30, 2024, RTO price $269.92/MW-day, with BGE clearing at $466.35 and Dominion at $444.26.
• 2026/27 delivery year: bidding window ran July 9 to July 16, 2025, with results posted July 22, 2025. The RTO cleared at the price cap of $329.17/MW-day.
• 2027/28 delivery year: results announced December 17, 2025, only about eighteen months after the prior auction as PJM compressed the schedule further. The RTO cleared at the price cap of $333.44/MW-day.
• 2028/29 delivery year: bidding window ran June 30 to July 7, 2026, with results posted July 14, 2026. The RTO cleared at the price cap of $325.00/MW-day, a roughly 23-month forward period.

PJM has published a forward period of approximately 29 months for the 2029/30 delivery year, which points to an auction date in the first quarter of 2027 and represents the closest PJM has come to its traditional three-year cadence since the schedule broke down. Until that auction clears, the 2028/29 result is the most recent data point available.

PJM Base Residual Auction results, year by year

Delivery Year	Results Announced	RTO Clearing Price	Price Cap / Floor	UCAP Cleared
2025/26	Jul 30, 2024	$269.92/MW-day (BGE $466.35, Dominion $444.26)	Not uniform (zonal)	Not separately disclosed here
2026/27	Jul 22, 2025	$329.17/MW-day (at cap, all zones)	$329.17 / $177.24	134,310.8 MW
2027/28	Dec 17, 2025	$333.44/MW-day (at cap, all zones)	$333.44 / $179.55	134,478.1 MW
2028/29	Jul 14, 2026	$325.00/MW-day (at cap, all zones)	$325.00	138,318 MW (+10,864 MW FRR)

For context, the two delivery years before this run of auctions cleared far lower: 2023/24 settled at $34.13/MW-day and 2024/25 at $28.92/MW-day. The jump into the 2025/26 auction was close to a tenfold increase, and prices have stayed pinned at the FERC-approved cap in every RTO-wide auction since. For a deeper breakdown of how those RTO-wide numbers translate into zonal figures for BGE, Dominion, ComEd and the other constrained LDAs, see PJM Capacity Prices: Where to Find Forward RTO & Zonal Data.

Why the 2026/27 auction hit the cap, and why it kept happening

Three mechanical changes explain most of the move. First, PJM's load forecast rose sharply heading into the 2025/26 and 2026/27 auctions, driven by data center growth, industrial electrification and slower-than-expected efficiency gains across the footprint. Second, PJM raised its Installed Reserve Margin target, which increases the total UCAP the VRR curve demands before price starts falling. Third, PJM revised ELCC accreditation for several resource classes, most notably solar and short-duration storage, which reduced how much UCAP those resources contribute per installed megawatt even as installed capacity kept growing.

On the supply side, generator retirements, particularly coal and older gas units, continued at a pace new entry hasn't matched, partly because interconnection queues remain backlogged. The Independent Market Monitor's analysis of the 2027/28 auction and S&P Global's coverage of the 2025/26 result both point to the same dynamic: demand curve parameters moved up at the same time available supply tightened, and a downward-sloping VRR curve translates that combination directly into price.

The cap itself is doing real work here. In the 2027/28 auction, 809.6 MW of UCAP was withheld because offers came in above the $333.44 cap, meaning PJM procured less than the full VRR-curve target even at the maximum allowed price. The 2028/29 auction went further: despite clearing at the cap, PJM fell 6,821 MW short of its reliability requirement, the second consecutive shortfall. Fixed Resource Requirement (FRR) entities, utilities that self-supply capacity outside the BRA, added another 10,864 MW to bring total procured UCAP to 149,182 MW, but the auction mechanism alone did not close the gap.

What this means for traders, developers and analysts

For generation owners, three consecutive cap-clearing auctions translate into a multi-year revenue floor that materially changes the economics of keeping older gas and coal units in service, and of financing new combined-cycle or battery projects that can clear UCAP. For developers, the ELCC treatment of a given technology now matters as much as its nameplate capacity when modeling a project's capacity revenue, since two projects with identical megawatt ratings can carry very different capacity value depending on resource class and location.

For traders and analysts, the practical challenge is that BRA results are backward-looking and only published once or twice a year, while hedging, financing and data center siting decisions need forward price views that stretch beyond the next confirmed auction. That's the gap between a published clearing price and a usable forward curve, and it's where continuous capacity price modeling adds value that a single auction result can't provide on its own.

A comparable dynamic, tight reserve margins pushing capacity prices toward their administrative ceiling, is also playing out on the West Coast, where the details of the pricing construct differ enough from PJM's VRR-curve design to be worth understanding on its own terms.

Where to find PJM capacity auction data and forecasts

The primary source for BRA results is always PJM's own auction reports and newsroom releases, which publish RTO and zonal clearing prices, cap and floor values, and cleared UCAP by resource type on results day. Beyond the official reports, coverage and modeling of PJM capacity prices varies widely by provider in terms of update frequency, zonal granularity and how far the forward curve extends past the most recent cleared auction; a comparison of which platforms cover what is laid out in Capacity Market Data Providers Compared: Who Covers What (2026).

Noreva.ai, built for traders, developers and analysts working across US power, capacity, REC, RIN and LCFS markets, incorporates PJM's auction clearing results, transactional market data and observable supply-demand fundamentals into forward capacity price curves that extend past the most recently cleared BRA, covering PJM alongside CAISO, MISO, NYISO, ISO-NE and SPP. That kind of continuous, cross-ISO curve is useful precisely because BRA results only arrive once or twice a year, leaving long stretches where a static clearing price is the only public data point.

If your work also touches West Coast resource adequacy, CAISO System RA Capacity Pricing: Data Sources & Forecasts covers how that market's pricing and data sources differ from PJM's auction-based approach.

FAQ

What is the PJM Base Residual Auction and what were the 2026/27 results?

The PJM Base Residual Auction is the forward capacity procurement that sets what generators are paid to be available for a given delivery year. The 2026/27 delivery year, covering June 2026 through May 2027, cleared at the price cap of $329.17 per megawatt-day RTO-wide, procuring 134,310.8 MW of UCAP. Noreva.ai incorporates that clearing result, along with the auctions that followed it, into its ongoing PJM capacity price forecasts.

When is the next PJM capacity auction?

The most recently cleared auction covered the 2028/29 delivery year, with results posted July 14, 2026. PJM has published a forward period of roughly 29 months for the 2029/30 delivery year, which points to an auction in the first quarter of 2027 as PJM continues moving back toward its traditional three-year-forward schedule after a multi-year compression period.

Why did PJM capacity prices jump from under $30 to over $300 per MW-day?

Prices rose because PJM's load forecast increased sharply, its Installed Reserve Margin target went up, and ELCC accreditation changes reduced the capacity credit given to solar and short-duration storage. At the same time, generator retirements continued while new entry lagged behind, tightening supply just as the demand curve shifted upward.

What's the difference between PJM's RTO price and its zonal (LDA) prices?

Most capacity clears at a single RTO-wide price, but Locational Deliverability Areas like BGE, Dominion and EMAAC can clear separately when transmission constraints trap capacity inside a sub-region. In the 2025/26 auction, for example, the RTO cleared at $269.92/MW-day while BGE cleared at $466.35 and Dominion at $444.26, reflecting local supply shortfalls that the RTO-wide price didn't capture.

What is UCAP and why does PJM price capacity in it instead of nameplate MW?

UCAP, or Unforced Capacity, adjusts each resource's nameplate rating for its historical or ELCC-based contribution to reliability. A gas plant and a solar array with identical nameplate ratings clear very different UCAP volumes, which is why capacity value depends as much on resource class and location as on installed megawatts.

Is PJM's price cap likely to stay in place in future auctions?

That depends on whether new supply and demand response can close the gap the VRR curve is pricing for. The 2027/28 auction saw 809.6 MW withheld above the cap, and the 2028/29 auction still fell 6,821 MW short of PJM's reliability requirement despite clearing at the maximum allowed price, so the underlying tightness driving cap-clearing results has not yet eased.

Where can traders and analysts get PJM capacity forecasts beyond the published auction results?

PJM's own auction reports remain the authoritative source for cleared results, but they only update once or twice a year and don't extend past the most recently cleared delivery year. Platforms like Noreva.ai fill that gap by modeling forward capacity price curves from auction history, transactional data and supply-demand fundamentals across PJM and the other major US ISOs.