(The square in the middle) – Pennsylvania is at the heart of the 13-state power grid called PJM.
This means that the state’s role in generating electricity to maintain electricity supplies in neighboring states is crucial. However, a report warns that recent government policy decisions have weakened the grid and made it more vulnerable to disruptions.
If further problems arise, there could be a power shortage by 2030.
“It’s an issue in Washington and in several state capitals,” said Ken Zapinski, director of research and public policy at Pittsburgh Works Together, which released the report and warns that the PJM grid is “in danger.”
PJM acts as a middleman, planning for the future and coordinating the market in which utilities and consumers buy electricity in 13 states and Washington, D.C. States like Pennsylvania, Illinois and West Virginia generate more electricity than they use, and states like Ohio and Virginia buy it, providing electricity to 65 million people.
However, increasing electricity demand, obstacles to building additional power and transmission lines, and a lack of authority or responsibility for certain problems are leading to frustration.
“Regardless of how you feel about the energy mix, transmission is going to require a lot of new buildings,” Zapinski said. “And it’s really difficult, time-consuming and expensive to build large buildings in this country.”
The result is that as coal-fired power plants close, they cannot replace electricity generation quickly enough. Obstacles from local zoning, state and federal regulations, and financial constraints after regulatory approval delay the development of new energy sources.
“For the grid to work, whatever it looks like in the future, a lot of big things have to be built,” Zapinski said. “If Pennsylvania isn’t producing the same amount of power for some reason, ultimately there’s no clear model for how that’s going to work.”
A PJM report released in June warned that energy demand will increase significantly by 2040 and that an additional “623 to 798 terawatt-hours of electricity per year will be needed to close the resource gap.”
A shortage of supply is “almost certain” unless the decommissioning of fossil fuels is slowed down or more energy generation plants are expanded more quickly.
But federal regulations, such as an EPA greenhouse gas regulation that would require coal-fired power plants to modernize their equipment or retire by 2032, led to premature retirements, Zapinski argued — at a time when PJM approved only 11 gigawatts of new projects in 2023.
State and federal regulations, as well as the priorities of power generators, utilities and businesses, mean that some actions negatively impact others.
“The real challenge is that no one person is in charge,” Zapinski said. “There are many different actors in the public and private sectors who are responsible for different aspects, and for everything to work properly, everything has to be aligned. If one of them is out of alignment, everything can fall apart very quickly.”
In February, a joint hearing of the Pennsylvania and Ohio Houses of Representatives and Senates heard testimony about how the bureaucracy shuts down power generators before replacements are available, affecting reliability. But a one-size-fits-all solution isn’t so easy to push through – no one group has the highest authority.
As the use of intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar power increases and the share of coal and natural gas decreases, the risk of power outages like those in Texas and California increases.
“This calculation is incorrect,” said Zapinski.
