Asim Haque, then PJM interconnection vice president of state policy and member services, shows West Virginia lawmakers the state had had more than 12,000 megawatts of queued capacity, most of it renewable, during a May 9, 2023, interim legislative session meeting.
High-tension power lines take electricity across the Kanawha River from the Kanawha City substation on Sept. 10, 2019.
Gazette-Mail file photo
“We write, as a bipartisan group of Governors elected by the many millions of citizens of our respective states, to tell you that fundamental changes, and new leadership, are needed.â€
A bipartisan group of nine governors from states all around West Virginia issued that strongly worded statement in a July 16 letter to the managing board of the region’s electric grid operator covering 67 million people.
The governors objected to soaring prices throughout the 13-state territory of that grid operator, the nation’s largest: PJM Interconnection LLC, which manages the electricity transmission system for West Virginia and its neighbors while operating markets that shape electricity rates for consumers.
Gov. Patrick Morrisey was not among the governors who signed the letter.
But West Virginia electric bills aren’t immune to rising prices in PJM territory, where a capacity auction triggered a record price spike last week that consumer advocates say is the latest evidence that the grid operator’s policies favor expensive aging, increasingly uneconomic power plants while blocking cheaper clean energy sources from hooking up to the grid and lowering prices.
“This extended price spike was preventable,†Sarah Moskowitz, executive director of Citizens Utility Board, an Illinois consumer advocacy group, said in a statement.
PJM territory is the most expensive for wholesale electricity among grid operators, with average summer wholesale electricity price of $57 at selected price hubs 27% higher than the national average of $45, according to federal Energy Information Administration data.
PJM prices have weighed more heavily on regional consumer allies since July 2024, when the operator’s capacity market, intended to ensure resource adequacy by creating price signals that indicate where and how much capacity is needed in future years, saw a nearly tenfold spike from the previous auction.
“[A]ll of this gets paid for by customers,†Ric O’Connell, founding executive director of GridLab, a national clean energy consulting group, said during a July 16 PJM-focused virtual briefing hosted by The Reliable Grid Project, a national network of grid experts and consumer advocates. “So at the end, customers pay for the energy, they pay for capacity and they pay for PJM’s functions.â€
Decreasing supply and increasing demand contributed to higher PJM capacity prices in the July 2024 auction.
Since capacity auctions impact future electricity rates, effects of the July 2024 auction weren’t felt until this year, with some states getting hit with electricity rate increases of up to 20% from last year.
Price spike impacts haven’t been as acute in West Virginia since, unlike in most PJM states, monopoly utilities control the power supply chain with oversight from a public regulator.
“States like West Virginia, they typically pay a bit more because they don't have the benefit of competition in their generation sector. But it's a little bit more stable over time, so you don't see all these changes going back and forth,†Abe Silverman, assistant research scholar with Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, said during a July 24 PJM-focused briefing hosted by The Reliable Grid Project.
O’Connell said high auction prices could even benefit West Virginia customers by allowing the state’s utilities to earn more revenue, since West Virginia is a net exporter of electricity to the regional grid.
But electricity prices have soared in West Virginia, even compared with other PJM states, amid West Virginia’s nation-highest reliance on increasingly uneconomic coal-fired power.
“I would say that 90% of the reason that West Virginians are paying high prices for energy is because their state regulators have really doubled down on coal,†O’Connell said.
But West Virginia isn’t immune to the price spikes that now come with being in PJM territory.
“Whether you're in West Virginia or anywhere else, we have less generation on the grid today than we need given all the [demand] growth,†Silverman said. “And so whether the price impacts are affecting you today or tomorrow, they're definitely coming.â€
W.Va.'s coal share more than quadruple PJM rate
Asim Haque, then PJM interconnection vice president of state policy and member services, shows West Virginia lawmakers the state had had more than 12,000 megawatts of queued capacity, most of it renewable, during a May 9, 2023, interim legislative session meeting.
Marshall University video screenshot
PJM has been heavily criticized in recent years for amassing a deep backlog of energy projects to connect to the grid — especially renewables that could have been lower-cost resources to help meet the grid’s projections of rapidly increasing demand as manufacturing sites and power-hungry data centers grow.
West Virginia has been at the extreme end of PJM’s fossil fuel energy dependence.
Coal represented 89% of West Virginia’s total installed capacity in 2024, according to a PJM state infrastructure report — dwarfing the PJM-wide rate of 21%.
But solar comprised 31% of West Virginia’s queued capacity as of May 2025, according to PJM data, with natural gas comprising 42%. Solar represented 28% of new interconnection requests in 2024, with natural gas representing 42% of new requests.
Solar, storage (including batteries that can store renewable energy and release it later) or a hybrid of both, plus wind comprised 71% of projects in transition in PJM’s interconnection queue in June 2025.
'Prices today are basically politically untenable'
PJM closed its interconnection queue in 2022, with new generation projects not slated to enter the operator’s reformed interconnection process until the spring of 2026. PJM indicated last month it was over 60% through roughly 200,000 megawatts of projects, most of them solar, wind or batteries, part of the transition to the reformed process launched in 2023.
“The prices today are basically politically untenable in terms of consumer impacts,†Jon Gordon, director of Advanced Energy United, a national industry association representing advanced energy and transportation options, said during The Reliable Grid Project’s July 24 briefing.
PJM’s auction last week hit a price cap of $329/megawatt-day that resulted from an April 2025 settlement between PJM and Pennsylvania led by its Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro. Shapiro has urged the grid operator to speed up its stalled interconnection queue, reform its capacity market and implement new best practices established by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which regulates interstate electricity transmission.
PJM said it expected the cap price to translate to a year-over-year increase of 1.5–5% in some customers’ bills, depending on how electricity providers and states pass on wholesale costs to consumers.
“As a consumer advocate, we are relieved that there was a price cap that protected ratepayers from even worse outcomes,†Clara Summers, Citizens Utility Board’s Consumer for a Better Grid Campaign manager, said during The Reliable Grid Project’s July 24 briefing. “But we are still frustrated that we got here in the first place. The market can't work until the interconnection queue delay is fixed.â€
'Making the rules for themselves'
The FERC on Thursday issued an order finding a PJM interconnection proposal didn’t comply with a previous FERC order for PJM to remove a standard that it only make “reasonable efforts†to meet study deadlines, calling the proposal a “collateral attack†on its rule. The FERC also found PJM didn’t comply with its past order by not proposing tariff revisions that implement required study delay penalties.
PJM reform advocates want to see not only the interconnection queue adjusted to allow more faster deployable energy construction but seasonal capacity markets that allow for more flexibility in pricing.
Summers also suggested PJM should hold utilities to a more uniform method of projecting how much capacity they need.
“Too often, a proposed data center is included in a utility load forecast, even if it has little chance of actually being built. This drives up prices,†Summers said. “There's a big difference between a data center that has knocked on the door of a utility and says it's interested in building there, versus a data center that has entered into a contract and put down money.â€
PJM has a two-tiered governance structure consisting of a Board of Managers with no affiliation with or financial stake in any PJM market participant, and a Members Committee that consists of generation owners, transmission owners, other suppliers, electric distributors and end-use customers.
The Members Committee includes 19 affiliates of American Electric Power, parent company of Appalachian Power and Wheeling Power.
Gordon accused PJM membership of being “heavily skewed toward incumbent utilities [and] resources.â€
“I think that's one reason why PJM has been slow to adapt to the clean energy transition, to anticipate it, to prepare for it, and to take the steps necessary to bring clean energy resources online quickly,†Gordon said.
“[F]undamentally, this is the regulated community making the rules for themselves,†Summers said. â€And that is problematic when the regulated community is profit-motivated.â€
In their open letter to the PJM Board of Managers this month, nine PJM state governors said “fundamental changes†and “new leadership†are “needed to restore confidence in PJM’s ability to meet the many challenges of this moment.â€
The nine governors included two Republicans — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.
When asked for comment on PJM’s oversight and the letter, Morrisey spokesman Drew Galang echoed West Virginia’s governor in extolling coal.
“Our country will face serious energy shortages in the future if we don’t find a way to extend the reasonable useful life of our coal plants and expand the use of gas facilities — this must be done in a manner that protects consumers,†Galang said in an email.
Galang said West Virginia “looks forward to working with PJM, utilities, neighboring states, power producers, and consumers, to help address energy affordability and the power needs of our region and our country.â€
West Virginia Attorney General John “JB†McCuskey, another vocal coal proponent, said at the West Virginia Press Association’s annual Legislative Lookahead in February he has “always viewed PJM with a little bit of skepticism.â€
“[M]y fear is that the oversight of PJM is frequently not nearly sufficient enough and not linked enough to the people whom they are regulating,†McCuskey said.
But leaders in other states like Shapiro in Pennsylvania and the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel David Lapp, that state’s governmental consumer advocate unit head, have been more outspoken in calling for PJM reforms than their counterparts in West Virginia.
“I’d be most concerned if the coal plants aren’t running during periods when it is clearly economical to run the plant,†West Virginia Consumer Advocate Division Director Robert Williams said in an email, noting that if West Virginia utilities have to buy energy at high PJM prices well above the utilities’ cost of producing energy at their own plants, they could sustain a substantial under-recovery of fuel costs.
West Virginia Delegate Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, led sponsorship of legislation in House Bill 2128 in February, that — had it not stalled within the House Energy and Public Works Committee — would have required that each public utility that is a member of a regional transmission organization submit information relating to the utility’s or an affiliate’s votes at a regional transmission organization meeting.
“That's something that could help shine a light on decisions that are made to benefit the utilities at the expense of average, everyday West Virginians,†Hansen said in a phone interview.
An 'unprecedented crisis' asserted
In April, PJM announced its president and CEO, Manu Asthana, decided to step down at the end of 2025.
“[T]he new CEO now is going to have a massive political problem, one that I don't think any PJM CEO has ever faced, where managing state politics is going to become a huge aspect of this new CEO's role,†Gordon said.
A month later, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a Valley City, Ohio-based energy market analysis firm, published a study projecting West Virginia electricity customers would have to pay over $440 million for two proposed transmission lines to support data centers.
Authored by IEEFA energy consultant Cathy Kunkel of ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä, the analysis found PJM existing transmission cost allocation methodology would cause West Virginia ratepayers to bear additional costs in the future for data center-driven transmission needs.
With data centers and other power demand sources expected to grow throughout PJM territory in years to come, PJM will be under the microscope. Consumer advocates hope to change its DNA before sharper price spikes gouge West Virginians.
“PJM itself,†the nine PJM governors wrote, “faces an unprecedented crisis of confidence.â€
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