Recent reporting from the Pulitzer Prize-winning energy and environment-focused media outlet Inside Climate News notes that PJM Interconnection, a nonprofit regional power grid administrator that manages the largest electricity grid in the country and includes all of West Virginia, has overseen two recent capacity auctions with recording-breaking cost increases that will be passed on to energy consumers.
A capacity auction, as the ICN article explains, is “an auction in which power plant owners compete to see who will offer the lowest prices to be available to the grid at all times.â€
Article authors Dan Gearino and Rambo Talabong point out that “Last year, the auction produced a result so unusual that this topic, usually reserved for the business press, became general news. The new price, which took effect two months ago, was $296.92 per megawatt-day, an increase from $28.92 per megawatt-day in the previous delivery year.â€
The authors continue “The most recent auction was last month, yielding an even higher price, $329.17 per megawatt-day. This price will take effect next June.â€
A megawatt-day is 24 megawatt-hours. The authors note that this is a unit with which most folks aren’t familiar, so they point out that the change in aggregate price that power plant owners stand to receive has gone from $2.2 billion two years ago to $16.1 billion following this most recent auction for 2026.
There are two key reasons the authors point to for these massive price increases: the building of data centers in the PJM Interconnection area and the delay in the buildout and connection of new energy sources to the grid. Despite being far cheaper to build and operate (as well as being far cleaner, safer and healthier for us all), solar, wind and energy storage projects face particularly long delays getting through construction and grid connection.
The authors report that there are 63 gigawatts of projects waiting for PJM Interconnection to complete the process of getting them connected, which should (ideally) occur by the end of 2026. Of those, 46 gigawatts have agreements to connect today, but issues outside of PJM’s control like siting, permitting and financing are slowing things down. One reason for the slowdown of renewable energy development is the fossil fuels cash-soaked Republican Party.
Stories you might like
Amidst these astronomical energy price increases, as well as the price increases unique to West Virginia due in large part to the state continuing its obscene level of reliance on coal-fired power (so well-documented by ÐÔÊӽ紫ý-Mail energy and environmental reporter Mike Tony), the West Virginia Public Service Commission (more like Petroleum Service Commission) decided recently to pile on.
West Virginia PSC Chairwoman, former FirstEnergy lobbyist Charlotte Lane, appointed to the PSC by coal baron and former Gov. Jim Justice, recently penned a 15-page letter to Trump-appointed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin.
The EPA administrator has decided to try to repeal the agency’s 2009 endangerment finding, wherein the agency concluded after reviewing a gargantuan amount of scientific evidence spanning decades that the buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions harms public health by causing global climate change. Chairwoman Lane expressed her and the PSC’s support for repeal of the endangerment finding, stating that the repeal is “a welcome recognition by the EPA of its past missteps and errors.â€
The only “missteps and errors†here are trying to eliminate the scientifically-sound legal basis on which the key federal agency tasked with protecting the environment and public health regulates greenhouse gas emissions and deliberately slowing and trying to altogether stop the development of far cheaper, cleaner, safer and healthier renewable energy. These missteps and errors are being compounded by the rush to build water-and-energy-guzzling data centers powered by massively polluting, expensive, harmful and climate-destabilizing fossil fuels.
There is no valid reason why the Mountain State, with its abundant sunshine, high-altitude winds and powerful rivers and streams, cannot take advantage of solar, wind and hydro-powered energy with numerous energy storage and smart grid options to help solve intermittency issues. There is no valid reason why we need to continue flattening our mountains, filling our valleys and creating ash ponds and slurry impoundments to continue feeding coal-fired power plants.
The risks and harms of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) for oil and natural gas are almost unfathomable and fracking itself is just one aspect of oil and gas extraction, transport, storage, use and waste disposal. I highly recommend picking up the book “Petroleum-238†by environmental journalist Justin Nobel if you want to understand the extreme dangers of the oil and gas industry. The book covers Justin’s seven-year investigation into oilfield radioactivity and includes information from investigations in West Virginia and Ohio.
We deserve better than this, folks, but we’ll only get what we unrelentingly demand. Please join me in refusing to be a criminal ancestor.
