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Republican lawmakers from across the mid-Atlantic region gathered in Harrisburg on Tuesday to discuss possible solutions to rising electricity costs and concerns around grid reliability, including cutting red tape for power generators and eliminating policies that aim to reduce planet-warming carbon emissions.
“Families, businesses and communities across Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia are all feeling the same pressure,” said state Rep. David Rowe, chair of the Pennsylvania House Republican Policy Committee, during a hearing Tuesday. “We share the same regional grid, the same transmission lines and the same responsibility to keep the lights on.”
Tuesday’s committee hearing came amid growing concern across the political aisle about electricity costs and power supply in the region. Public officials from both parties agree that more needs to be done to curtail rising costs for families and get new sources of power connected to the grid faster. But they disagree about how to get there.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Republican lawmakers from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia asked for policy guidance from two fossil fuel industry representatives, a conservative think tank, an electricity consumer advocate and a representative of the regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection.
Why are electricity prices rising?
Electricity prices have shot up in the past year, rising nearly 15% in Pennsylvania, 19% in New Jersey and more than 7% in Delaware, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal government data.
A recent study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the main driver of electricity bill increases through 2024 was costs associated with the infrastructure needed to transport electricity to the end user, not the costs of generating the electricity itself.
In the mid-Atlantic, part of the price hike has come from a spike in PJM’s capacity auction prices. The regional grid manager uses this auction to guarantee that energy producers will contribute enough power to the grid to meet projected demand in the future. The independent market monitor for the PJM region, Monitoring Analytics, identified rising demand due to the growth of data centers as the “primary reason” prices soared in last year’s capacity auction.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Republican lawmakers from the region blamed the rising prices on policies that encourage sources such as wind and solar, as well as environmental regulations they say forced the closure of fossil fuel-burning power plants.
The recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study supports some of this assessment. It found that renewable energy in the absence of mandates did not raise costs, but renewable portfolio standards — policies that require energy suppliers to source a minimum amount of renewable energy — did play a role in price increases in some states. New Jersey’s standard, for example, raised electricity prices between 2019 and 2024 by roughly 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, according to the Washington Post.
