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Six state Governors send a joint letter to the Chairman of PJM Board of Managers stating that PJM’s most November 19th efforts to deal with A.I. data center electricity demands have failed and urged the grid operator to take ‘decisive action’ to avoid ‘extraordinarily high prices’ and to add new electric generation.”

The letter was signed by Governor Josh Shapiro of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Governor JB Pritzker of State of Illinois, Governor Phil Murphy State of New Jersey, Governor Matt Meyer, State of Delaware, Governor Wes Moore, State of Maryland and Governor Glenn Youngkin, Commonwealth of Virgina.

“Over the last three months — since your August 8 letter initiating the Critical Issue Fast Path (CIFP) process — the PJM community has sought to find consensus solutions to integrate large load additions (LLAs) into our shared grid while ensuring reliability and affordability. The November 19 Members Committee votes — in which all twelve proposals were overwhelmingly rejected — make clear that this effort has fallen well short of consensus, and more importantly, has failed to provide both the reliability and affordability that our communities rely on from PJM.”

“As representatives of millions of PJM customers, we actively engaged in the Critical Issue Fast Path (CIFP) process on Large Load Additions (LLAs) at multiple points, including in collaboration with other stakeholders. All our engagement has been intended to protect customers from excessive price increases in future Base Residual Auctions, to secure grid reliability and to develop new mechanisms that incent new generation. Given the Members’ votes, we are greatly concerned that we will shortly end up with the least desirable outcome: forthcoming auctions that yield extraordinarily high prices, but neither guarantee reliability nor lead to a corresponding increase in generation and provide no clear regional rules for LLA integration.”

“PJM’s proposal is clearly insufficient to prevent this outcome, offering only incremental improvements to existing processes without meaningfully facilitating responsible LLA integration, or the much – needed increase in generation that is required in this moment. In short, settling for PJM’s proposed solutions will assure neither reliability nor affordability for our region.”