BALTIMORE — The nation’s largest power market is facing renewed pressure from a governor with presidential aspirations to control electricity prices and better protect mid-Atlantic states from potential energy shortfalls.
Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, on Monday upbraided utility executives attending the annual meeting of PJM Interconnection, the operator of the high-powered transmission system delivering electricity across 13 states from Chicago to New Jersey to the tech corridors outside of Washington.
“There’s no clear plan by PJM to address both affordability and reliability,” said Moore, who faces reelection this year and who is eyeing a 2028 presidential run.
PJM’s leadership, Moore said, isn’t acting with the urgency that state leaders expect as electricity demand is projected to race ahead of supply before the end of the decade — as data centers and the digital economy consume vasts amount of power. Concern about the erosion of grid reliability and energy inflation is driving political debates heading into midterm elections.
Moore kept up the monthslong drumbeat of criticism directed at PJM’s power market from the Trump administration and high-profile Democratic governors, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill. One of their key gripes: PJM failed to see the rise of artificial intelligence and the next phase of U.S. industrial growth.
“Even if we didn’t foresee the scale, data centers are not new. And we knew a while ago that we would see a lot more,” Moore said. “But PJM failed to get ahead of it, and did not have the structure in place to accommodate this load and maintain reliability at an acceptable cost, in a way that all these states expected.”
Pennsylvania-based PJM, regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is under immense pressure to both build in consumer protections against wholesale electricity price spikes and to speed up its process for connecting generation and data centers to the grid.
PJM this month released a white paper outlining the so-called credibility gap at the heart of its market problems: Higher capacity prices in PJM’s wholesale market that would otherwise spur power plant investments provoked a political backlash. Price caps, as a result, have discouraged investors.
But in the 70-page white paper, PJM CEO David Mills also pushed back against the political pressure.
“Those choices belong to the people and institutions with democratic accountability for their consequences — to state regulators and legislatures, to FERC, to consumers and the advocates who represent them,” Mills wrote. “PJM’s role is to ensure those choices are made clearly, not to substitute our judgment for theirs.”
Moore on Monday countered with frustration that states are having to go it alone by crafting their own responses to double-digit increases in utility bills tied to the wholesale power market.
“We shouldn’t have to do the job of PJM for PJM,” the governor said. “And if PJM cannot step up, then states like Maryland will continue to do what we can to protect our people. And the challenge is: every other state is going to do the same. And that coordination that is necessary will not be there.”
Moore called on the grid operator to shift more infrastructure costs onto data centers, clear its interconnection queue for new generation and hold a special auction in September to sign up utilities and data center operators for 15-year power supply contracts. Holding a September auction — as opposed to delaying it — is “a test of whether PJM can deliver under pressure.”
After Moore’s remarks, PJM leaders stressed their efforts to partner with state leaders.
Asim Haque, PJM’s executive vice president for government and member services, said PJM’s 1,000-plus member companies are sensitive to the affordability crisis Moore described.
“This is a gentleman who is responsible for over 6 million residents, and again, they are struggling,” Haque said of Moore, taking the stage immediately after the governor’s remarks. “If we internalize that as a collective and decide to move forward with the kind of urgency and vigilance that the governor referenced, I think we’ll make great strides here together.”
Prices from PJM’s most recent capacity auction — a solicitation meant to ensure enough power to meet the grid’s peak demand with some extra in reserve — topped $325, more than 10 times higher than 2024-2025 delivery prices. That was the maximum price PJM agreed to under a cap negotiated under pressure from its member states, and it still did not attract as much capacity as PJM sought.
Moore pointed to that capacity auction as a sign of PJM’s shortcomings: “That’s not a market signal; that’s a system that isn’t working,” he said.
He pushed back on the idea that the electricity supply has been worsened by state climate policy pushing fossil fuel-fired plants to retire. That argument, he said, is “incomplete at best, and an unproductive excuse at worst.”
“It wasn’t the states that drove those retirements. New, cheaper, cleaner technologies out-competed aging coal and gas plants,” Moore said, adding that was why states like Maryland have so aggressively supported renewables like solar and battery storage.
“State policy did not design the interconnection queue. It wasn’t Maryland that green-lit billions in transmission investments to serve the needs of other states. That wasn’t Maryland,” he said. “That was PJM, but the consequences of those decisions are showing up monthly on Marylanders’ bills.”
Moore’s arguments echoed some of the criticisms leveled against PJM at a protest outside the Baltimore meeting.
“PJM sets the rules, and right now, those rules are blocking affordable, clean energy from getting onto the grid fast enough to even matter,” said Pennsylvania state Rep. Danielle Friel Otten, a Democrat.
Maryland Del. Lorig Charkoudian said the current supply crunch could have been alleviated if PJM had brought renewable energy and battery storage online at a faster pace, especially when the federal government was subsidizing it.
In a statement after Moore’s speech, PJM said the grid operator is working to accelerate new interconnection to lower prices.
“This is a generational challenge that no one organization, state or industry can solve alone,” said Jeffrey Shields, a spokesperson for PJM. “It will take coordination across policymakers, grid operators, utilities, generators, and large energy users to help evolve the grid at the speed and scale this moment demands,”
PJM, he said, “is working with relentless focus to accelerate the connection of new generation while preparing the system to support growing demand, evolving technologies, and the needs of the 67 million people we serve.”
Mona Zhang contributed to this report.
