U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, vice-chair and chair of the National Energy Dominance Council respectively, on Jan. 16 joined Mid-Atlantic governors urging the PJM Interconnection “to temporarily overhaul its market rules to strengthen grid reliability and reduce electricity costs for American families and businesses by building more than $15 billion of reliable baseload power generation,” the Department of Energy said.
The initiative calls on PJM to conduct an emergency procurement auction “to address escalating electricity prices and growing reliability risks across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States,” DOE said.
The direction includes:
- Providing long-term certainty for new power generation: Provide 15-year revenue certainty for new power plants to accelerate the development of reliable power generation.
- Protecting residential electricity rates: Protect ratepayers by limiting the amount existing power plants can be paid in the PJM capacity market.
- Ensuring data centers pay their fair share: Make data centers pay more for new generation than residential customers by allocating costs for any new generation procured to data center customers that have not self-procured new capacity or agreed to be curtailable.
- Prioritizing immediate grid stability: Take other steps to ensure more affordable, reliable, and secure electricity for the American people.
The recommendations "propose temporary but critical measures to ensure American businesses, especially those in some of the nation’s most manufacturing intensive regions, have the reliable power they need to operate. The measures will also help keep electricity prices affordable for residential customers, while addressing rising demand from data centers," DOE said.
In an Engage message to APPA members, Latif Nurani, Senior Regulatory Counsel at APPA, noted that PJM has already put significant effort in 2025 to develop a Critical Issues Fast Path process, which was intended to address many of the same issues identified in the agreement between the Trump Administration and the governors.
FERC had ordered PJM to provide a status update on that Critical Issues Fast Path process by January 17.
To the extent that PJM ultimately agrees to carry out the principles that were agreed to, changes to its tariff must be filed at FERC which must find the changes to be just and reasonable, Nurani noted.
