How Trump Made an Electricity Price Deal With Democrats

If “war is too important to be left to the generals,” as the French statesman Georges Clemenceau said, then electricity policy may be too important to be left up to the regional transmission organizations.

Years of discontent with PJM Interconnection, the 13-state regional transmission organization that serves around 67 million people, has culminated in an unprecedented commandeering of the system’s processes and procedures by the White House, in alliance with governors within the grid’s service area.

An unlikely coalition including Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, and the governors of Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee (Republicans), plus the governors of Maryland, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and North Carolina (Democrats) — i.e. all 13 states of PJM — signed a “Statement of Principles” Friday demanding extensive actions and reforms to bring new generation onto the grid while protecting consumers.

The plan envisions procuring $15 billion of new generation in the region with “revenue certainty” coming from data centers, “whether they show up and use the power or not,” according to a Department of Energy fact sheet. This would occur through what’s known as a “reliability backstop auction,” The DOE described this as a “an emergency procurement auction,” outside of the regular capacity auction where generation gets paid to be available on the grid when needed. The backstop auction would be for new generation to be built and to serve the PJM grid with payments spreading out over 15 years.

“We’re in totally uncharted waters here,” Jon Gordon, director of the clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United, told me, referring to the degree of direction elected officials are attempting to apply to PJM’s processes.

“‘Unprecedented,’ I feel, is a word that has lost all meaning. But I do think this is unprecedented,” Abraham Silverman, a Johns Hopkins University scholar who previously served as the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities’ general counsel, told me.

“In some ways, the biggest deal here is that they got 13 governors and the Trump administration to agree to something,” Silverman said. “I just don't think there's that many things that [Ohio] Governor [Mike] DeWine and or [Indiana] Governor [Mike] Braun agree with [Maryland] Governor [Wes] Moore.”

This document is “the death of the idea that PJM could govern itself,” Silverman told me. “PJM governors have had a real hands off approach to PJM since we transitioned into these market structures that we have now. And I think there was a real sense that the technocrats are in charge now, the governors can kind of step back and leave the PJM wrangling to the public service commissions.”

Those days are over.

The plan from the states and the White House would also seek to maintain price caps in capacity auctions, which Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro had previously obtained through a settlement. The statement envisions a reliability auction for generators to be held by September of this year, and requested that PJM make the necessary filings “expeditiously.”

Shapiro’s office said in a statement that the caps being maintained was a condition of his participation in the agreement, and that the cost limit had already saved consumers over $18 billion.

The Statement of Principles is clear that the costs of new generation procured in the auction should be allocated to data centers that have not “self-procured new capacity or agreed to be curtailable,” a reference to the increasingly popular idea that data centers can avoid increasing the peak demand on the system by reducing their power usage when the grid is stressed.

The dealmaking seems to have sidestepped PJM entirely, with a PJM spokesperson noting to Bloomberg Thursday evening that its representatives “ were not invited to the event they are apparently having” at the White House. PJM also told Politico that it wasn’t involved in the process.

“PJM is reviewing the principles set forth by the White House and governors,” the grid operator said in a statement to Heatmap.

PJM also said that it would be releasing its own long-gestating proposal to reform rules for large load interconnection, on which it failed to achieve consensus among its membership in November, on Friday.

“The Board has been deliberating on this issue since the end of that stakeholder process. We will work with our stakeholders to assess how the White House directive aligns with the Board’s decision,” the statement said.

The type of “backstop procurement” envisioned by the Statement of Principles sits outside of PJM’s capacity auctions, Jefferies analysts wrote in a note to clients, and “has been increasingly inevitable for months,” the note said.

While the top-down steering is precedent-breaking, any procurement within PJM will have to follow the grid’s existing protocols, which means submitting a plan and seeking signoff from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Gordon told me. “Everything PJM does is guided by their tariffs and their manuals,” he said. “They follow those very closely.”

The governors of the PJM states have been increasingly vocal about how PJM operates, however, presaging today’s announcement. “Nobody really cared about PJM — or even knew what they PJM was or what they did — until electric prices reached a point where they became a political lightning rod,” Gordon said.

The Statement is also consistent with a flurry of announcements and policies issued by state governments, utility regulators, technology companies, and the White House this year coalescing around the principle that data centers should pay for their power such that they do not increase costs for existing users of the electricity system.

Grid Strategies President Rob Gramlich issued a statement saying that “the principle of new large loads paying their fair share is gaining consensus across states, industry groups, and political parties. The rules that have been in place for years did not ensure that.”

This $15 billion could bring on around 5.5 gigawatts of new capacity, according to calculations done by Jefferies. That figure would come close to the 6.6 gigawatts PJM fell short of its target reserve margin after its last capacity auction, conducted in December.

That auction hit the negotiated price caps and occasioned fierce criticism for how PJM manages its capacity markets. Several commissioners of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have criticized PJM for its high capacity prices, low reserve margin, and struggles bringing on new generation. PJM’s Independent Market Monitor has estimated that planned and existing data center construction has added over $23 billion in costs to the system.

Several trade and advocacy groups pointed out, however, that a new auction does not fix PJM’s interconnection issues, which have become a major barrier to getting new resources, especially batteries, onto the grid in the PJM region. “The line for energy projects to connect to the power grid in the Mid-Atlantic has basically had a ‘closed for maintenance’ sign up for nearly four years now, and this proposal does nothing to fix that — or any of the other market and planning reforms that are long overdue,” AEU said in a statement.

The Statement of Principles includes some language on interconnection, asking PJM to “commit to rapidly deploying broader interconnection improvements” and to “achieving meaningful reductions in interconnection timelines,” but this language largely echoes what FERC has been saying since at least its Order No. 2023, which took effect over two years ago.

Climate advocacy group Evergreen Action issued a statement signed by Deputy Director of State Action Julia Kortrey, saying that “without fixing PJM’s broken interconnection process and allowing ready-to-build clean energy resources onto the grid, this deal could amount to little more than a band aid over a mortal wound.”

The administration’s language was predictably hostile to renewables and supportive of fossil fuels, blasting PJM for “misguided policies favored intermittent energy resources” and its “reliance on variable generation resources.” PJM has in fact acted to keep coal plants in its territory running, and has for years warned that “retirements are at risk of outpacing the construction of new resources,” as a PJM whitepaper put it in 2023.

There was a predictable partisan divide at the White House event around generation, with Interior Secretary Burgum blaming a renewables “fairy tale” for PJM’s travails. In a DOE statement, Burgum said “For too long, the Green New Scam has left Mid-Atlantic families in the dark with skyrocketing bills.”

Shapiro shot back that “anyone who stands up here and says we need one and not the other doesn’t have a comprehensive, smart energy dominance strategy — to use your word — that is going to ultimately create jobs, create more freedom and create more opportunity.”

While the partisan culture war over generation may never end, today’s announcement was more notable for the agreement it cemented.

“There is an emerging consensus that the political realities of operating a data center in this day and age means that you have to do it in a way that isn't perceived as big tech outsourcing its electric bill to grandma,” Silverman said.

Editor’s note: This article originally misidentified the political affiliation of the governor of Kentucky. It’s been corrected. We regret the error.