PJM Interconnection, the nation's largest competitive wholesale power market, has been swept up in the maelstrom of the public and political fallout that's emerged in the wake of surging prices in its capacity market, which reflect a sharp increase in demand because of greater electrification and data center growth. With electricity prices a key part of the affordability crisis Americans are experiencing, PJM is working to ensure there is enough generation capacity on its system to meet data center growth and surging demand for electricity, says former Pennsylvania PUC chair Glen Thomas, who heads the PJM Power Providers group, known as P3.

Thomas notes that PJM has in its queue proposed capacity equal to the market's all-time summer peak of 168 GW, with even greater amounts projected as a result of programs adopted in response to the growing political furor over data centers and surging electricity prices, such as the Expedited Interconnection Track program, which has more than 2,100 megawatts in the development pipeline and another 440 MW of new capacity as a result of Energy Department loan programs supporting the uprating of nuclear plants.

"There's a lot of reasons to be optimistic that the market signals that are being sent are being responded to," Thomas says, while acknowledging "a lot of challenges" lie ahead to get this huge amount of new capacity online. "When I see examples like this, this is what gives me cause for optimism."

Thomas sees the focus on reforming governance and market design at PJM as distractions from the hard work needed to realize the roughly 2.6 GW of additional new capacity already in the pipeline under PJM's existing governance and market rules.

"Governance is important. I don't want to deny that, dismiss that, or say that the governance structure of these RTOs is not important," he says. "There's work to be done at the wholesale level to meet the challenge of these new massive loads coming onto the system. I worry that the governance conversation, you know, distracts from the focus that should be on these other issues."

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Diana Moss, an economist and Director of Competition Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, advocates applying antitrust policy throughout the economy for the benefit of consumers. The former FERC economist and former president of the American Antitrust Institute warns that remonopolization of the energy industry, along with the greater consolidation throughout the economy the result of regulators stepping back from antitrust enforcement, is contributing to the "epic cost of living crisis" that's become a major political issue for the midterms.

"Consumers are left completely on the side of the road in terms of being protected because that's not happening right now. We're not seeing the agencies or the sector regulators promote competition and protect consumers," Moss says.

The impact is being worsened by the Trump administration's efforts to insert itself into energy markets to effectuate desired outcomes, she says. "The rollback of regulations, the refiring of old coal plants, the shutting down of offshore wind, you know, fuel efficiency standards. All of this is happening in an industry where the planning horizon for firms is very long. We're not talking about a nimble industry with the ability to pivot quickly in terms of planning and expansion. We're talking about an industry that has a very long-term planning horizon. And you know, coal is gone. Coal is permanently gone. It's not coming back. [T]his disruption that the Trump administration has layered in on the energy industry is putting the industry into this state of of paralysis, and it is worsening our ability to remain competitive on the global scale. It is driving up costs for consumers."

The new poster child for consolidation in the electricity sector is the massive proposed merger between Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy, which would create the largest utility in the country. Federal antitrust regulators have already signed off on the merger, leaving sector regulators like FERC and state utility commissions to protect the interests of consumers, she says. She notes that the companies' primary justification for their consolidation rests largely with the prospect of producing economies of scale that drive down costs, particularly in terms of meeting anticipated demand from the data center buildout. "But you know the question is, what are the costs of that in terms of increased market power and ability to affect rates and who builds what and where and who gets access to those markets?"

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Dan Becker has been a decades-long advocate for policies addressing the climate disruption that is occurring because of the accumulation of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, first at the Sierra Club and today with the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign.

Becker says a decades-long misinformation campaign that he attributes to oil and auto industry interests is responsible for the legions today who question the fact-based science and agree with the president that climate change is a "hoax."

The industry interests long understood that climate "was not necessarily very good for their profits, for their continued sales of the commodities that they wanted to get sold, nor for the trillions of dollars of subsidies that the fossil fuel companies receive," Becker says. "So they mounted a big campaign to try to convince -- I don't think the people, because I don't think that they thought that the American people or people around the world were going to be the problem. They were focused on decision making, and they recognized that members of Congress, for example, run expensive campaigns, and they need a lot of money for those campaigns. And so, in addition to lies about the science, I think the key weapon was campaign money, and the Republican Party in particular came to rely substantially on fossil-fuel industry campaign contributions to run their very expensive campaigns."

Despite the long-stalled progress on climate action, Becker remains optimistic that there is still time to address the problem before the already steady drumbeat of climate disasters becomes truly catastrophic.

"I think we have already committed ourselves to a very substantial warming. It's up to us to prevent it from being catastrophic," he says. "And the things that we need to do are not radical things. They're using less oil, burning less stuff, making our cars go further on a gallon of gas, or on electricity instead of gas, shifting to renewables -- they're very sensible steps that will save money, will create jobs, and will protect our lives and our children's future all at the same time."

In his current role promoting climate-safe transit, Becker says U.S. automakers are making the same mistake with Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers that they made in the 1970s, which resulting in a big loss of market share to the upstart Japanese carmakers. Today, by ceding the EV market to China, U.S. automakers are setting the stage to becoming uncompetitive in the rapidly growing world market for EVs, he warns.

"Already the Chinese are making vastly more EVs than the American manufacturers," he says, calling it "colossally stupid for the American auto companies to behave the way they're doing."

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