How an Electricity Rate Freeze Could Actually Work

So how do you freeze electricity rates, exactly? That’s the question soon to be facing New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, who achieved a resounding victory in this November’s gubernatorial election in part due to her promise to declare a state of emergency and stop New Jersey’s high and rising electricity rates from going up any further.

The answer is that it can be done the easy way, or it can be done the hard way.

What will most likely happen, Abraham Silverman, a Johns Hopkins University scholar who previously served as the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ general counsel, told me, is that New Jersey’s four major electric utilities will work with the governor to deliver on her promise, finding ways to shave off spending and show some forbearance.

Indeed, “We stand ready to work with the incoming administration to do our part to keep rates as low as possible in the short term and work on longer-term solutions to add supply,” Ralph LaRossa, the chief executive of PSE&G, one of the major utilities in New Jersey, told analysts on an earnings call held the day before the election.

PSE&G’s retail bills rose 36% this past summer, according to the investment bank Jefferies. As for what working with the administration might look like, “We expect management to offer rate concessions,” Jefferies analyst Paul Zimbrado wrote in a note to clients in the days following the election, meaning essentially that the utility would choose to eat some higher costs. PSE&G might also get “creative,” which could mean things like “extensions of asset recoverable lives, regulatory item amortization acceleration, and other approaches to deliver customer bill savings in the near-term,” i.e. deferring or spreading out costs to minimize their immediate impact. “These would be cash flow negative but [PSE&G] has the cushion to absorb it,” Zimbrado wrote.

In return, Silverman told me that the New Jersey utilities “have a wish list of things they want from the administration and from the legislature,” including new nuclear plants, owning generation, and investing in energy storage. “I think that they are probably incented to work with the new administration to come up with that list of items that they think they can accomplish again without sacrificing reliability.”

Well before the election, in a statement issued in August responding to Sherrill’s energy platform, PSE&G hinted toward a path forward in its dealings with the state, noting that it isn’t allowed to build or own power generation and arguing that this deregulatory step “precluded all New Jersey electric companies from developing or offering new sources of power supply to meet rising demand and reduce prices.” Of course, the failure to get new supply online has bedeviled regulators and policymakers throughout the PJM Interconnection, of which New Jersey is a part. If Mikie Sherrill can figure out how to get generation online quickly in New Jersey, she’ll have accomplished something more impressive than a rate freeze.

As for ways to accomplish the governor-elect’s explicit goal of keeping price increases at zero, Silverman suggested that large-scale investments could be paid off on a longer timeline, which would reduce returns for utilities. Other investments could be deferred for at least a few years in order to push out beyond the current “bubble” of high costs due to inflation. That wouldn’t solve the problem forever, though, Silverman told me. It could simply mean “seeing lower costs today, but higher costs in the future,” he said.

New Jersey will also likely have to play a role in deliberations happening in front of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about interconnecting large loads — i.e. data centers — a major driver of costs throughout PJM and within New Jersey specifically. Rules that force data centers to “pay their own way” for transmission costs associated with getting on the grid could relieve some of the New Jersey price crunch, Silverman told me. “I think that will be a really significant piece.”

Then there’s the hard way — slashing utilities’ regulated rates of return.

In a report prepared for the Natural Resources Defence Council and Evergreen Collective and released after the election, Synapse Economics considered reducing utilities’ regulated return on equity, the income they’re allowed to generate on their investments in the grid, from its current level of 9.6% as one of four major levers to bring down prices. A two percentage point reduction in the return on equity, the group found, would reduce annual bills by $40 in 2026.

Going after the return on equity would be a more difficult, more contentious path than working cooperatively on deferring costs and increasing generation, Silverman told me. If voluntary and cooperative solutions aren’t enough to stop rate increases, however, Sherrill might choose to take it anyway. “You could come in and immediately cut that rate of return, and that would absolutely put downward pressure on rates in the short run. But you establish a very contentious relationship with the utilities,” Silverman told me.

Silverman pointed to Connecticut, where regulators and utilities developed a hostile relationship in recent years, resulting in the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority chair, Marissa Gillett, stepping down last month. Gillett had served on PURA since 2019, and had tried to adopt “performance-based ratemaking,” where utility payouts wouldn’t be solely determined by their investment level, but also by trying to meet public policy goals like energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Connecticut utilities said these rules would make attracting capital to invest in the grid more difficult. Gillett’s tenure was also marred by lawsuits from the state’s utilities over accusations of “bias” against them in the ratemaking process. At the same time, environmental and consumer groups hailed her approach.

While Sherrill and her energy officials may not want to completely overhaul how they approach ratemaking, some conflict with the state’s utilities may be necessary to deliver on her signature campaign promise.

Going directly after the utilities’ regulated return “is kind of like making your kid eat their broccoli,” Silverman said. “You can probably make them eat it. You can have a very contentious evening for the rest of the night.”