Meet the Organization Raising Electricity Bills Up to 30% in 13 States. This June, 65 million Americans will see bill increases because PJM is not connecting clean energy to the grid fast enough, causing a shortfall in power and skyrocketing energy auction prices.
Source: ch442
3 Comments
The politics always gets turned up to 11 on PJM’s capacity market. It’s far from perfect, but the market is going through a transition in supply with retirements and growing demand, which means prices should go up. Renewables are not growing there in part because the region has poor renewable resources compared to Texas, California, etc. One real issue is that it takes longer to build power plants than when the capacity market was designed, that impacts clean energy and gas plants so it’s unclear how much new capacity can take advantage of a three-years forward price signal, which would ultimately bring prices down.
PJM doesn’t have direct control over capacity prices, they just oversee the auction. A couple of details about the auction:
-6,600 MW of fossil resources have retired or have signaled their intent to retire
-The peak load forecast has increased by ~3,000 MW
-PJM has cleared 38,000 MW of new resources through its queue, but supply chain, siting, and other external factors have prevented most of this from actually being built. These are factors that PJM has no control over
-PJM wind and solar account for 2% of cleared resources. These resources do not have the same reliability contribution as a dispatchable unit
People blame PJM for higher bills, but this is really out of PJM’s control. Fossil resources are retiring and load is increasing due to state policies, and our permitting / supply environment doesn’t allow for a lot of new capacity to come online. It’s also just difficult to reliability replace dispatchable fossil units with just wind, PV, and batteries. This isn’t a shadowy company trying to extract money, this is a market sending a clear signal of insufficient supply.
Source:
https://www.tdworld.com/utility-business/news/55130896/pjm-interconnections-capacity-auction-secures-resources-to-meet-rto-reliability-requirement-for-2025-2026
Suck for them! Mine will stay the same since we use solar!