Gov. Matt Meyer and Delaware’s Public Advocate Jameson Tweedie join other states in calling for more transparency and ratepayer-focused leadership within the PJM Interconnection.
The PJM Interconnection is the profit-neutral regional grid operator for all or parts of 13 states and Washington, D.C., including Delaware, and the organization has recently come under scrutiny for contributing to utility price hikes amid daunting energy supply and demand issues.
With two open PJM Board of Managers seats and a search underway for the organization's new CEO, Gov. Meyer joined the chief executives of Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and Tennessee in a letter to the board stating that "fundamental changes, and new leadership, are needed to restore confidence in PJM’s ability to meet the many challenges of this moment."
The letter calls out the PJM's "multi-year inability to efficiently connect new resources to its grid and to engage in effective long-term transmission planning" amid rapidly rising load growth.
“The people of Delaware—and millions of families and businesses across the PJM region—are paying the price for a grid system that’s become less reliable and more expensive," Gov. Meyer said in a statement. “It’s time for PJM leadership to put affordability, transparency, and long-term planning front and center. By treating states as more of a partner and giving the people a stronger voice in Board decisions, we can begin to restore public trust, accelerate clean energy deployment, and deliver the reliable service our communities deserve.”
Tweedie explains PJM handles the large-scale flow of energy within the region to make sure that there is sufficient electricity to meet demand.
"In doing that, they have to manage transmission — so that can include huge transmission projects, big power lines, that sort of thing. And also, they run what is called a capacity auction — a base residual auction — which is the process that PJM uses to ensure that there is enough power available at all times, and particularly available when it is needed during peak times," Tweedie said. "And so those costs, both in terms of transmission projects as they get built out, infrastructure projects and the capacity auction when it happens, those are all costs that, in one way or another, get allocated out throughout the region and ultimately to ratepayers."
The July 2024 capacity auction closed at $14.7 billion — the year prior it closed at $2.2 billion.
The daily megawatt price increased by over 800% compared to the year prior and Delmarva Power customers alone saw an average increase of $10 per bill as of June 1.
Following the unprecedented increase, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and ultimately a settlement was reached that set a ceiling and a floor for capacity auction prices moving forward.
Despite this settlement, the July 2025 auction set another new record for capacity prices with a 22% jump compared to a year ago.
This increase is expected to raise ratepayers’ bills again, anywhere from 1.5% to 5% beginning in June 2026.
Aside from the auctions, Tweedie says new generation projects often face excessive red tape through PJM’s approval process, which is only further contributing to the region's supply issue.
“Many people have felt that PJM's interconnection process is too slow and that it means that new power generation is not getting interconnected fast enough," he said.
At a hearing before the General Assembly in March, PJM testified it had a total of 488 generation projects in its queue that would bring over 55,000 megawatts of generation to the grid.
At the time, the organization said the existing installed capacity sat at just over 181,000 megawatts for the entire region.
Delaware is the state contributing the lowest amount of capacity in the region, and PJM testified that states should be avoiding policies intending to push existing generation resource off of the system until an adequate quantity of replacement generation is online. It also encouraged states to help bring new generation resources onto the system "as soon as possible."
But Tweedie says its up to PJM to ensure the region as a whole is functioning with sufficient, cost effective generation, noting state lines are irrelevant when it comes to the flow of electricity.
"I don't think that just because Delaware doesn't have a bunch of new generation projects in the queue, other than the US wind project, which is a substantial generation project, isn't terribly important if the generation and the transmission is available to make sure that the system as a whole functions," Tweedie said. "I think it's also relevant [that] Delaware, for the most part, has not been a place where we have seen huge data center load growth, whereas you have in some other states. Virginia is a prominent example. And so the need for new power generation in Delaware is not as extreme as power that is able to get to other places where they are seeing that huge load growth."
Tweedie is referring to the contentious Maryland offshore wind project that is looking to bring power onto the regional grid through a connection point in Sussex County. The project is on hold due to Sussex County Council's denial of a necessary zoning permit for the project — US Wind is currently suing County Council in the Delaware Superior Court over the denial.
Tweedie does acknowledge that Delaware City is currently being scouted as the home to potentially one of the largest data centers in the country, but no plans have been finalized yet.
One of the largest points of concern around the potential center is if it would generate its own power to meet its own demand or if it would draw from the public grid.
"From my perspective, a data center of this size would have immense impact to the grid, and it is hard to imagine that they would not have immense impacts to the cost to ratepayers. I'm not sure how accurate everything is and how much is fully known, but the projections of how big this data center could be, if fully built out, are that it could exceed the power demand of all homes in Delaware, and there's just no way you build something with that kind of power demand without having huge implications for everyday Delawareans, unless it is done very carefully and with very careful consideration of how you do that in a way that doesn't impact the grid," Tweedie explains. "And that includes that even if a site like that were to build its own generation, it also has to be generation that comes online at the same time that the data center comes online. It needs to be generation that runs pretty much all the time."
Tweedie and consumer advocates of eight states and Washington, D.C. raised concerns over the impact of these types of data centers in their own letter to the PJM Board of Managers:
"Recent predictions of load growth, driven by the assumed proliferation of data centers and artificial intelligence that will outpace the interconnection of additional generation, compound these challenges. PJM’s leadership must ensure that grid managers can meet the challenges they face while assuring that essential electricity service is available to all consumers, especially given the ever-increasing cost of power. Accordingly, the ability of PJM’s leadership to adequately consider and meet the interest of consumers served by PJM is of paramount importance."
States are reportedly meeting with PJM this week to review candidate nominations for the open board positions.
