What happens when the biggest electricity grid operator in America isn’t required to consider electricity costs for residents as it makes decisions about serving data centers or paying power plant owners? 

We land right where we are today, with electricity bill hikes across the PJM Interconnection region hitting households again and again. Adding it up, it’s more than $63 billion in customer costs from the last four PJM capacity markets alone, nearly half due just to data center demand.

As federal energy regulators convene stakeholders to try to hammer out an agreement on PJM governance reforms, there can be no mistake about one change we must see: making the grid operator start serving the public interest. 

Commentary on regional transmission organizations like PJM is typically the purview of energy experts and analysts. The structure of PJM decision making itself also ensures it is dominated by insiders: power plant owners, big energy buyers like data centers, utilities, and transmission companies. They all have a financial self interest in decisions, as well as the time and money to staff the intensive process. 

However, when it comes to the 67 million consumers whose interest is making ends meet, PJM allocates just 1.4% of the stakeholder votes to them. States have little avenue for formal influence or regular consultation. A mayor gets none, even though we’re among the first to see the rippling effects of bill hikes on residents and local businesses. 

If PJM were expected to consult with city leaders, I think they’d hear a lot of common ground. Our experience in Dayton includes the same loss of manufacturing that many other areas across Ohio and Pennsylvania, combined with a shift toward health, tech, service, and defense. There’s fierce local pride and a hard-working culture, but many families are struggling. 

Household electric bills in Dayton averaged $188 this July, up 22% from the year before. Another $34 a month might not matter as much if you’re making $200,000 a year, but the median household income in our city is about $45,000 a year, with more than 1 in 4 households living at or below the poverty line. Every dollar toward every bill matters, meaning everything that can be done on energy cost matters, too. 

We’re doing what we can with the levers available at a municipal level. We’ve awarded funding that will help hundreds of residents improve their homes through weatherization and energy efficiency upgrades, which will help trim utility bills by about 10–20%. We are also expanding solar installations on municipal facilities to lower long-term operating costs for taxpayers while increasing access to community solar through our 50-megawatt solar project. We’re big believers in the cost savings and pollution cutting that come with clean energy sources. But we can’t do this alone. We need a partner for affordability in PJM.

The fact that PJM’s latest electricity capacity auctions racked up $63 billion in costs without improving service is a case in point for the problem with the corporate influence in PJM governance. As costs have risen on bills, power plant owners have been getting paid billions more as the risk of blackouts has only risen. 

The next capacity market PJM is preparing to run at the end of September for data centers is another example of the problem. In that market, PJM will pay up to another $20 billion to power plant owners, in favor of deals with fossil fuel plants instead of faster, cheaper and cleaner solutions like energy storage that could help keep costs and pollution down to better serve the public interest. 

There are a number of other commonsense governance reforms needed at PJM that federal regulators and stakeholders should prioritize, including important measures around transparency, board composition, and voting. But as it stands in the PJM Operating Agreement now, there is no formal commitment to serve the public interest or to consider electricity affordability just as much as reliability. Fixing that problem is a must. 

It’s been 15 years since the last major changes in the decision-making process at PJM. Clearly, it’s been way too long. The incumbent interests that have controlled decisions inside PJM have used that time to maintain their earnings by stifling the evolution of our grid as times changed, exacerbating today’s crisis in our region. 

With so many residents needing cost relief, there is no time to waste in resetting the fundamental mission at PJM.

As published in the Dayton Daily News.