If data centers were to bring their own new clean energy it would reduce or eliminate those costs that all of us are currently paying on behalf of data center developers. Data centers bringing their own clean energy would also prevent the ungodly amount of pollution they would otherwise cause, but Getting data centers to bring their own new clean energy is now easy feat. It will require smart, effective policies both at the level of the regional PJM grid and at the state level.

I am very lucky to be joined by State Senator Katie Fry Hester who has been doing incredible work to protect consumers from potential increased of cost and pollution from data centers both at PJM and here in Maryland.

It has been well documented that the sources of air pollution have been concentrated in black and brown communities. NYT reporting found that Black Americans are exposed to higher levels of air pollutants from all sources, including construction emissions, power plant emissions, industrial emissions, and emissions from cars and trucks. All people of color are similar exposed to higher than average rates of pollution from all of those same sources, with the exception of power plants

I hope we can all agree that concentrating pollution sources in Black and Brown communities is wrong, but Maryland lacks sufficient legal frameworks to right that wrong. That’s why a coalition of environmental justice advocates in Maryland are pushing to pass the Cumulative Harms to Environmental Restoration for Improving our Shared Health or CHERISH Act, introduced by Delegates Behler and Johnson and Senator Brooks

To talk about why the CHERISH Act is needed and what it does, I am joined by Jennifer Kunze who is the Maryland Organizing Director at Clean Water Action and Carlos Sanchez-Gonzalez with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust

The project would be newsworthy just because of its size, but on top of that it also happens to be located on an old coal mine and is now providing local and state tax revenue that was lost when that coal mine closed.

This project is a great example of the tremendous benefits we get out of investing in the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard in terms of jobs, tax revenue, and instate generation, but to me it also feels like a symbol of possibility, proof in miniature that transitioning to the clean economy is possible and beneficial. To talk all about this project, the Maryland energy policies that made it possible, and what lawmakers can do to make sure more projects like this one keep coming online, I am joined by Mike Resca, the executive Vice-President of CPV Renewables, the company that developed the backbone solar project.

This move sends the hot potato of energy issues to Chair Korman, who is my guest today to talk all about how he sees energy issues and what is thinking is at the start of the 2026 legislative session.

Chair Korman and Subcommittee Chairman Fraser-Hidalgo also organized a series of briefings on energy issues for their committee. The briefings are terrific and I have linked them below:

Briefing with representatives from the Texas and California grids:

Briefing with PJM:

Briefing with clean energy industry and climate advocates:

Briefing with the Maryland Department of the Environment:

Briefing with utilities and Constellation:

Briefing with the Maryland Energy Administration:

Briefing with the Public Service Commission and the Office of the People’s Counsel:

The SAVINGS Act, introduced by Delegate Qi and Senator Hester, would deploy grid enhancing technologies that will allow us to get more transmission capability without building new transmission lines. To talk all about this bill, why it is necessary and, how it works I am joined today by Katie Mettle who is the Policy Principal for Maryland and New Jersey at Advanced Energy United

A Zero-Emission Heating Equipment Standard paired with a Clean Heat Standard has the potential to fully decarbonize almost all of Maryland’s building stock and lower energy bills in the process.

In this episode I am joined by Ruth Ann Norton who is the President of Green and Healthy Homes Initiative and Tony Sirna who is the Senior Policy Lead on Buildings for Evergreen Action to explain these policies and their benefits in detail.

Maryland’s investments in solar are paying major dividends in the form of more in-state generation, more jobs, and lower energy costs. Solar is, of course, now the cheapest form of electricity generation and continuing to deploy it at a rapid clip is essential to meeting growing energy demand.

Vice-Chair Charkoudian has developed a policy that will improve how Maryland invests in solar energy, allowing more solar to be built more quickly while also reducing the ratepayer impact of clean energy policies. She has, in her policy wizardry, found a way to make every dollar spent on solar go farther, to increase the number of dollars spent on solar, and simultaneously decrease the number of dollars spent on renewable energy, and by the end of this episode by god you will understand how it works.

The solar policy that Vice-Chair Charkoudian is introducing this year and that we will be discussing today is largely the same as the solar components of her Abundant Affordable Clean Energy bill she introduced last year. While many portions of her bill got incorporated into the leadership energy package, the solar policies were left on the cutting room floor, and so she is back to finish the job.

Vice-Chair Charkoudian and I recorded this episode before the news broke that she had been named Vice-Chair of the Economic Matters Committee, so I don’t use her new title in the episode.

Samay Kindra who leads government affairs for Vicinity Energy talks about Vicnity’s plans to generate their steam electrically.

According to recent analysis, Every dollar invested in EmPOWER Maryland returns $1.81 in benefits for Marylanders. By reducing aggregate consumer demand for power, EmPOWER investments keep electric rates down for all of us. As a result, EmPOWER has saved Marylanders more than $4 billion on their energy bills and reduced statewide greenhouse gas emissions by at least 9.6 million metric tons.

EmPOWER is the silent workhouse of decarbonization in Maryland, consistently slashing energy bills and emissions in both the power and residential sectors year after year, one attic insulation job at a time. To talk about EmPOWER, how it works its miracles, how it has changed over time, and what benefits we can continue to expect from the program I am joined by Mike Specian who is a Research Manager at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy or ACEEE and Justin Barry who is a Director of Energy Initiatives at the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative

The very next year, in 2023 Maryland had the tremendous good fortune to have Governor Moore appoint Serena McIlwain as the new Secretary of the Maryland Department of the Environment. Secretary McIlwain arrived in the position with a clear mandate from the legislature to eliminate net climate pollution.

And she has taken up the mantle given to her by the legislature. Her department has created a detailed roadmap for how to achieve that requirement, the Climate Pollution Reduction Plan, a plan that, if fully implemented would save the average household up to $4,000 in reduced energy costs, generate up to $1.2 billion in public health benefits, increase personal income by $2.5 billion, and create a net gain of 27,400 jobs between now and 2031 as compared with current policies. She not only created that plan but has led her team in an effective implementation of the plan

In this episode I have the great honor to be joined by Secretary McIlwain to talk about new data on how close we are to hitting the necessary pollution cuts, the tremendous work she has done so far and what work remains. She is actually joining this conversation from Rio De Janeiro where she is attending the 30th UN Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties or COP 30

I’m going to focus on five decision points that PJM, our regional grid operator, made which boxed Maryland into this costly situation, and the first of these forks in the road was a decision not to plan.

Decision point 1: not planning

By the early 2000s coal plants were closing at a rapid clip. In 2012 US coal consumption had already fallen 20%, with all indicators that this trend would continue. The fracking revolution has unlocked an abundance of methane gas which was powering new gas plants which were less expensive than coal. At the same time, a majority of US States had by that time established some form of Renewable Portfolio Standards, locking in a commitment to lower carbon energy sources. Even at this early date, the writing was on the wall for coal consumption in the United States.

Any serious organization tracking energy issues at that time would have been able to predict that coal plants would be closing down in the not too distant future. What would the shift away from coal mean for the grid? What changes would have to be made to ensure continued reliability? These are the questions that a Regional Transmission Organisation like PJM is in charge of answering. And many grid operators across the country were stepping up to proactively plan for the closure of coal. The best practice here would be to look at a map, imagine every coal plant were to close, and then figure out what new generation and transmission is needed to maintain reliability and what the most cost effective solution would be from a system-wide perspective. With such a robust, researched, and forward looking plan in hand a grid manager could proactively prepare the grid of the future.

Many grid operators did just this. For example, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator or MISO is the midwest’s equivalent of PJM, except their acronym actually stands for something, unlike PJM which is now a kind of proper noun acronym. MISO includes 15 states stretching from Mississippi to North Dakota. In June 2020 MISO launched its Long Range Transmission Planning Process. This “comprehensive regional planning process” was undertaken with the explicit goal of improving reliability and “enabling future generation as envisioned by MISO’s members” And after hundreds of public meetings and 40,000 staff hours of work, MISO released two tranches of transmission projects designed to prepare for the electricity grid of 20 years from now. This is what it looks like to build infrastructure in a coordinated, thoughtful way, working backward from where you know the energy system is headed. Taking this approach will unlock benefits far greater than the cost of the projects. Benefits are estimated to be somewhere between 180% to 350% greater than the costs

MISO’s process is far from perfect, and it is slow going, but they identified a problem and made a robust effort to proactively find the most cost effective solution.

If in 2023, when Brandon Shores and Wagner Coal plant announced that they would close by 2025, PJM had been years into a long term transmission plan then the announcement would have been less disruptive, and it’s possible the grid would be ready for their retirement in 2025, which would have saved Marylanders a lot of money, as we shall see.

By not doing proactive transmission planning, PJM left itself vulnerable when predictable disruptions, like the closure of a coal plant, arrive. The lack of planning on PJM’s part also means that they are just reacting to individual occurrences, finding an expensive patchwork solution that solves the immediate problem, but leaves the grid just as vulnerable when the next coal plant announces its retirement.

To PJM’s credit, in 2023 the staff proposed a long term transmission planning plan, but PJM stakeholders, including utilities and power generators voted it down. As we will see later, those stakeholders who voted down long term planning ended up benefiting a great deal financially from that lack of planning

Not engaging in long term planning is analogous to a car rental company not planning for what to do when their existing fleet of cars gets old and needs to retire. The decision not to plan creates the conditions where it is a crisis whenever cars stop working, which is inevitable.

In May of 2024 The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued order 1920 which required every regional transmission organization to engage in long-term transmission planning. The very next month, June of 2024, PJM joined other stakeholders in seeking a rehearing of the order, and they continue to seek significant exemptions from the requirement. Noot only did they make the choice not to plan, but they are actively fighting regulation requiring them to plan.

Decision point 2, queue mismanagement

The second decision point that PJM made was mismanage and ultimately close their interconnection queue

If a new, large power plant of any kind wants to connect to the grid, it must receive approval from the grid operator before coming online. This is true of every grid, but PJM is notoriously slow and inefficient at clearing new projects out of their grid. On average, a solar or battery power plant has to wait 3 and a half years to make it out of the PJM queue, and that’s just the average. Some projects have had to wait as long as 5 years to get PJM approval.

Delaying a project multiple years often kills the project. When putting together a proposed new solar farm, developers need to seek financing then make sure the revenue from the project will generate more than the costs to build it at a specific interest rate. So if you put your project together in 2022 when interest rates were low, but you come out of the PJM queue in 2025 when interest rates are high then maybe your project doesn’t make economic sense to build anymore. Many organizations that provide financing for this kind of project aren’t willing sit on their capital for three years waiting for the project to come out of the queue, so by the time PJM finally gives the greenlight, it’s possible the financing isn’t even there.

It’s also difficult to manage a supply change when you don’t know how many years your project is going to be suspended in permitting purgatory. On top of all that, federal tax credits are going away and delaying projects out of the queue could make the difference between a project getting federal incentives and not getting federal incentives.

All that to say, making projects wait 3 and a half years kills projects. In fact, roughly 80% of all the projects that do make it out of the PJM queue never end up getting built. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is that PJM takes a very long time to approve projects.

PJM’s slow pace of approval had, by 2022, caused a massive buildup of projects waiting to get in. solar, batteries, and onshore wind are affordable and abundant, so a lot of projects wanted to get built, but as the number of projects requesting to connect to the queue increased, PJM’s pace stayed as slow as ever. In 2022 there were about 40,000 megawatts of solar, battery, and wind projects requesting PJM interconnection. A nearly 400% increase in the size of the queue from just two years ago.

Given that it would be untenable to keep the backlog growing at such a rapid pace, PJM could do one of two things. They could either start processing applications to connect to the grid faster, or they could decrease the number of new power plants seeking to connect to the grid. Unfortunately, PJM chose the second option and in 2023 they announced that they were closing the PJM queue to new power plants.

To continue the analogy, this would be like a car rental company with an aging fleet of cars and an abundance of low cost new cars on the market enacting a new policy that it would not buy any new cars

PJM could have gone the other direction. They didn’t have to close the queue. They could have followed the example of Texas where the regional grid operator has what they call a “connect and manage” approach. This approach means Texas can get a utility scale solar projects connected to the grid in as little as 8 months and the very longest a project would wait on Texas’s grid is 2 and a half years. The longest wait times in Texas are shorter than the average wait times in PJM.

To be fair to PJM, they did close the queue for the purpose of working through the backlog and overhauling their system. Since then they have announced changes to their queue that will hopefully improve things. In June PJM said it had made its way through 60% of the backlog and record solar is getting connected to the grid. Hopefully this is a sign that queue reform will work, though the queue is still closed to new applications.

What we do know is that the queue is still closed and has been for the past two and a half years. No other RTO has stopped accepting new project applications to be considered for connection. PJM could have shortened interconnection times without closing its queue for years. We know PJM is capable of moving quickly when it wants to because they are currently considering creating an Expedited Interconnection Track that would let very large new generation sources go from application to approval in just 10 months. but it chose to stop taking new applications for connections at a time when energy demand is increasing and coal plants are closing.

And that brings us to Brandon Shores and Wagner coal plants. Located right next to each other and just south of Baltimore on the Patapsco River the two plants have a combined capacity of just over two thousands megawatts. When they were first built over 50 years ago they were baseload power plants, running almost all the time As time went on and coal generation became the most expensive power source in the market they became the power generation source of last resort, and these coal plants began to run less and less. In recent years they have run very rarely. They effectively operate as peaker plants, turning on only at times when the grid is strained.

In November of 2020 Talon Energy, the owner and operator of both plants, announced that both Wagner and Brandon Shores would transition to burning coal to a different fuel by 2025 as part of a settlement agreement they reached with the Sierra Club. At the time, Talon didn’t plan to close the power plants but instead kept them open while using alternative fuel sources. Then in April of 2023, the same year that PJM closed its queue because they couldn’t handle the avalanche of interconnection requests, Talon informed PJM that instead of converting the Brandon Shores and Wagner to alternative energy they would simply close the power plants.

At this point it is worth noting that Maryland lawmakers did not force this coal plant to close. Lawmakers considered a bill that was introduced several years in a row that would have required all the coal plants in the state to close, and they chose not to pass that legislation. But coal plants don’t need legislative mandates to close. Economics is closing them at lighting speed. From 2011 to 2024 the United States went from having 318 gigawatts of installed coal capacity to just 175 gigawatts, and the speed of that decline increased during the first Trump Administration and shows no signs of stopping in his second. Coal is expensive, really expensive, and the coal plants on the PJM are old. The average age of a coal plant in PJM is 45 years. Maryland lawmakers didn’t close these plants, economics did. The owner of the plants, Talen, said so themselves. In a filing earlier this year Talen said that it “decided to cease operations of the generation facilities because it determined continued plant operations were uneconomical”

And so, as a result of coal simply being a more expensive fuel source than other options on the market, and following a national trend seen all across the country in red states and blue states for over a decade, in April of 2023 they told PJM they wanted to shut down.

At this point, if PJM had been engaging in long-term transmission to get ahead of the clear and obvious trend that and if they had a faster interconnection process so that the 40 thousand megawatts of clean energy waiting in the queue in 2022 had been able to connect quickly, then perhaps the closure of these two power plants would not have been such a big deal. However, PJM had not done either of those things and so they determined that the closure of these plants would be too damaging for reliability.

Decision point 3, reliability must run

This brings us to the third decision point and this is where PJM really starts burning money. PJM entered into a reliability must run agreement with Talen Energy to keep the coal plants open through 2029. A reliability must run agreement is exactly what it sounds like, an agreement between PJM and the power plant operator where the power plant operator gets additional funds in exchange for staying open for reliability reasons. This specific agreement includes paying Talen a total of $720 million dollars to extend the life of those coal plants. $720 million all coming from ratepayers. That is enough money to pay for at least 4 thousand megawatts of utility battery scale storage, twice the capacity of the coal plants being retired. OPC is challenging that exorbitant subsidy in litigation. Staff at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission determined that the actual cost of service subsidy needed is roughly half the amount PJM is giving to Talen.

PJM didn’t have to enter into a reliability must run agreement with Brandon Shores for more than four years until a transmission line could be built to replace the coal plants. They could have entered into an emergency procurement of battery storage to be sited at the Brandon Shores and Wagner where the grid interconnection already exists and replaced the coal plants with zero emission technology for less than the cost of keeping those polluting plants operating four more years.

Advocates tried to get PJM to choose the less expensive and zero emission option to replace Brandon Shores before Brandons Shores had announced their plan to retire, but PJM said it was their policy that they don’t need to plan for a retirement until the retirement is announced, and that announcement could come as little as three months before the actual retirement date. That policy has since been updated, but it was their policy at the time.

In 2024 Delegate Charkoudian even introduced a bill focused on helping batteries replace the needed capacity at Brandon Shores, though it did not pass.

To continue the metaphor. Imagine that at the car rental company you own you are told that for the same amount of money you could keep your old fleet of clunker cars operating a few more years or for less money you could purchase a new fleet of cleaner, safer, better cars and then you choose to sink all that money on the old cars.

Through negligence and mismanagement, PJM first created the conditions where two coal plants closing is a problem for reliability and then chose the most expensive and polluting option to fix that problem. And so, through a series of bad decisions, ratepayers are stuck paying over $700 million to subsidize coal plants, but here is where PJM makes their most unjustifiable decision yet.

Decision point 4: capacity auction

The fourth bad decision involves the capacity auction.

Every year PJM holds a capacity auction. This system is designed to make sure there is always enough generation capacity on the grid to meet demand. The auction is supposed to be driven by supply and demand, so if demand increases, costs increase. If supply increases, costs decrease. Growing energy use creates more demand which put upward pressure on costs and having more power plants increases supply which puts downward pressure on costs.

In 2024 PJM held a capacity auction that saw a sudden spike in prices. The capacity auction price increased over 900%. This spike is the result of multiple factors including a surge in data center electricity usage and PJM not allowing enough new clean energy to connect to the grid, but that year the capacity auction cost billions dollars more than it would have without PJM’s fourth bad decision.

When PJM held this auction they pretended that the Brandon Shores and Wagner coal plants were closed. Despite the fact that the coal plants were open and that we are all paying over $700 million dollars to keep them open, PJM ran their models as though they didn’t exist. This decreased supply of electricity generation, driving up the cost of the capacity auction. Maryland’s OPC estimates that the exclusion of the Brandon Shores and Wagner coal plants increased the cost of the capacity auction by $5 billion. Those billions of dollars are being paid by ratepayers and funneled directly to the owners of coal and gas plants like Talen energy. Those same companies are voting members within PJM and helped make the decisions which led to their windfall profits at the expense of ratepayers.

This decision would be the equivalent of, after paying an exorbitant amount to keep your old cars running, not even renting out the cars you are paying so much to keep operational.

This inexplicable exclusion sparked a lot of pushback including an official complaint filed by Maryland’s OPC. PJM eventually admitted it was wrong to have excluded Brandon Shores and Wagner from its capacity market and included them in the 2025 auction, but they never reran the 2024 auction and the billions of dollars charged to ratepayers are still being paid out. OPC has filed an additional complaint seeking for those funds to be repaid back to ratepayers. Delegate Charkoudian led a legislative sign on letter in support of that complaint, which is still outstanding.

Before we get to the final bad decision PJM makes in this sad saga, I think it is relevant to review how PJM makes its decisions. PJM is, it’s important to remember, a private organization, not a part of the government. PJM itself is a nonprofit, though the CEO does make over $900,000, but its decisions are governed by voting members, the vast majority of whom are for profit, shareholder driven companies, and whose votes are a secret never made visible to the public. A super majority block of voting PJM members is made up of for profit companies that own power plants, like Talen energy, for profit utilities, like BGE, and for profit transmission line owners. These voting members are, at the end of the day, who PJM as an organization is accountable to. Knowing that, their pattern of behavior begins to make more sense.

All of these decisions were not in the interest of lowering energy prices, they were certainly not in the interest of reducing pollution, and they often weren’t even in the interest of increasing reliability. However, each of these decisions were very much in the interest and directly benefit Talen energy. Talen had a hand in making PJM’s decisions to not engage in transmission planning and to close the queue, and those decisions caused Talen energy to receive billions of dollars in additional ratepayer funded subsidy. As we will see, Exelon and its subsidiaries like BGE similarly have votes in PJM governance and benefit immensely from the decisions PJM made.

Without significant changes to the governance structure at PJM, it is difficult to envision them changing course and beginning to prioritize the public interest in their decision making over the interest of their share holder driven voting members.

Decision point 5: a $1.5 billion transmission line

That is exemplified by this fifth and last bad decision in this series of unfortunate events

Here PJM should have issued a request for proposals to solve the reliability problem caused by Brandon Shores and Wagner closing down. They could have compared options that might have included a patchwork of smaller transmission lines, utility scale battery storage, virtual power plants, or some combination of these options. They could have compared prices, gone with the best option, and signed a contract with strict controls to prevent price overruns. Instead, by not taking steps to plan for transmission, PJM manufactured a crisis justifying a no bid contract award to Exelon who is a voting member of PJM.

Their selected solution was to have BGE and its sister companies build and ratebase a transmission line to run from Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania into the Baltimore region and provide the necessary power to replace these coal plants. The price tag on that transmission line was an additional $700 plus million dollars to be paid by ratepayers. Remember that this is on top of the $700 million we are paying in life support to the coal plants, and that life support was already more expensive than purchasing batteries to solve the reliability problem.

Not only was that initial price tag extremely expensive, but in the short period of time since PJM selected BGE for this project, the price estimate has more than doubled to 1.5 billion dollars, and construction hasn’t even begun yet. This, I think, is a prime example of the conflict of interest in PJM’s governance structure. PJM decided not to allow a competitive bidding process and instead simply award $1.5 billion dollars to BGE, and BGE, along with other companies with the same parent company, Exelon, are voting members in PJM.

To complete the car rental metaphor, this would be like finally realizing at long last that you do have to buy new cars, but instead of comparing prices and going with the best option, you go with possibly the most expensive option because the company selling those cars has a seat on your board.

The transmission line is expensive, but the good news is that it will solve Maryland’s reliability concerns with the coal plants shutting down. Once that transmission line is complete, Maryland will be able to meet our growing electricity demand through 2042 through a combination of instate generation and imports. It’s also worth noting that according to PJM themselves, electricity usage in Maryland is not expected to surpass the 2011 peak electricity demand until 2045. While demand is expected to skyrocket elsewhere in PJM because of data centers, that trend is not happening here in Maryland, and electricity demand in the state has decreased sharply since 2011 thanks to successful energy efficiency programs like EmPOWER.

Maryland should absolutely generate more electricity instate, but once the transmission line is finished we will be able to provide enough electricity to meet demand, assuming that the larger PJM region as a whole has enough electricity generation to meet growing demand.

Here I want to take a moment to tease out two different, but often conflated questions. The first question is: Will Maryland have enough electricity to meet our state’s needs assuming there is sufficient generation in PJM as a whole and the second question is, will PJM have enough electricity generation capacity to meet growing demand. The answer to the first question is yes. Once this new BGE transmission line is built we will have an abundance of electrical capacity, and PJM has ensured the two coal plants will stay online until the transmission line is complete. The second question, whether the entire PJM region can generate enough electricity to meet the growing peak demand of the entire region is a bigger question. The answer to that question depends on whether the most astronomical projections of data center load growth are accurate, if they are accurate, whether PJM will allow that much new demand onto the grid and risk reliability for their existing customers, and whether PJM can succeed in speeding up their interconnection process. I’ll also briefly say that grid capacity questions are really questions about peak demand. Installing heat pumps does not add to Maryland’s peak demand because we are a summer peaking grid, so adding demand in the winter time does not increase our peak. The bathrooms at Camden yards may have lines during the 7th inning stretch, but if someone wants to use their bathroom in the offseason that doesn’t affect the lines at peak hours. Heat pumps are actually more efficient than air conditioners, and so their installation helps reduce summer peak demand. There are real questions about PJM-wide whether new generation capacity can keep pace with growing data center demand, but this should not be a reason to limit home electrification.

Summary

So, to sum up, PJM has ensured that Maryland will have sufficient electrical capacity, but they found the most expensive and least responsible way to do it. PJM has failed to engage in long-term planning, Mismanaged their interconnection queue, creating a bottle neck that has limited the amount of new energy coming onto the grid, spent ratepayer dollars that could have been used to build new clean energy on propping up old coal plants, failed to include those coal plants in a capacity auction, and decided not to issue a request for proposals to solve the reliability crunch, resulting in a 1.5 billion dollar transmission line. Taken together, this pattern of decision making has taken billions of dollars out of ratepayers pockets and used those dollars to prop up antiquated energy systems and line the pockets of the companies calling the shots at PJM

The investments Maryland makes in clean energy technologies pales in comparison to the scale of the subsidies PJM gives to fossil fuel power.

As I hope I have made clear, no ordinary company would survive if it made the kind of decisions PJM has made. It would be put out of business through competition of other companies making better decisions resulting in lower prices and better outcomes, but PJM is not an ordinary company. It is a bizarre private organization that faces no market competition for its role and simultaneously cannot be fully regulated by the states it encompasses.

I know I said it would just be me and you on this episode, but I have to play you this clip of Delegate Charkoudian speaking at a recent conference with poor acoustics on PJM reform where she describes the untenable nature of the current governance situation better than anywhere else I have heard it described. You can listen here, and Delegate Charkoudian starts speaking around the 26:30 minute mark

This situation will likely only change if one of two things happens. Either the federal government will step in and use their authority to reform PJM, and that seems unlikely for at least the next three years, or the states that make up PJM band together to pressure them into making reforms.

The good news is that the states in PJM are banding together and pushing back on PJM’s antics like never before. All the governors in PJM have written a joint letter to PJM asking for changes to the governing board at PJM. As I mentioned earlier, Maryland lawmakers sent a letter to FERC demanding that Brandon Shores and Wagner be included in the capacity auction. The Maryland office of the People’s Counsel filed an official complaint on that topic. Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro has publicly questioned whether or not his state should leave PJM and New Jersey has even passed a law to study what it would look like to leave PJM if Maryland and Pennsivlania did as well. It seems that PJM has finally pushed its captive ratepayers too far.

In response to this pressure PJM has begun to take small steps in the right direction. To be clear, this is still far short of the sweeping reforms needed to change incentives and behavior, but they have instituted a cap on the capacity auction to help protect ratepayers, and they included Brandon Shores and Wagner in the 2025 capacity auction. PJM has also taken steps designed to help projects to move through the queue more quickly, though as I said we have yet to see whether they will work. In 2025 Maryland also passed a law that requires Maryland utilities to disclose how they vote on some PJM votes because historically we don’t even get to see how organizations at PJM vote.

The Brandon Shores and Wagner coal plants stand as monuments to PJM’s mismanagement. Through their choices, PJM manufactured the circumstances in which these coal plants are soaking up hundreds of millions of dollars in ratepayer funds more than 30 years after the last generator was built. Bradon Shores and Wagner are physically standing in the way of a cleaner, more reliable and affordable energy future. They are literally a concrete example that you cannot count on fossil fuels as a reliable and affordable source of energy.

Thank you for listening to this storied tale. I hope we can all take away that Maryland should do everything in its power to help the solar, batteries, and onshore wind that are coming out of the PJM queue actually get built, and that Maryland stakeholders should keep pushing PJM to institute major reforms. PJM clearly is not immune to pressure from its constituent states, and continued pressure will surely continue to yield positive results and hopefully, one day, it will undergo significant enough reforms that it will start prioritizing reliability and affordability for ratepayers over profit for its members.

The Maryland General Assembly in 2025 passed legislation to conduct a study about Maryland’s BEPS program and how it could be improved, and while that study is ongoing, it is worth looking at Maryland’s only other successful BEPS program, the one in Montgomery county which is successfully being implemented today.

To talk about all about Montgomery County’s BEPS program and what lessons the state wide BEPS program could take away I am joined by Emily Curley who is the

Building Energy Performance Programs Manager for Montgomery County and Garrett Fitzgerald who is the Section Chief - Climate Programs and State Policy for Montgomery County.

You can read all about how lawsuits challenging BEPS are flimsy here. That blog talks about a Colorado case specifically, but the case being brought in Montgomery County is on even shakier ground.

In the first half of 2025 China installed more than 250 gigawatts of solar energy. For context, the PJM Grid has a combined total capacity of 182 gigawatts. So the solar China installed just in the past 6 months is capable of meeting 130% of PJM’s peak demand

And this is not just happening in China. In 2024 Pakistan imported 17 gigawatts of solar power, equal to the countries entire installed capacity of gas power, and twice the installed capacity of their coal fleet, imported in a single year.

For the first time Texas is regularly meeting roughly half of its power demand with solar energy, and California, the fourth largest economy in the world, can at times meet 100% of its power demand with solar energy. So much solar has been built in California that the use of gas for electricity generation has decreased 40% since 2023

Globally, the world installed 64% more solar so far in 2025 than we did in 2024, which was itself a record smashing year, an exponential growth rate of head spinning speed

This is all happening because solar energy is now by far the cheapest form of electricity generation the fastest to build, and the cleanest to boot.

To celebrate this bright spot in energy news, Third Act has declared today, September 21st as Sun - Day, a day to celebrate the amazing power of the sun. To talk about what this new solar paradigm means for Maryland I am joined by Leah Meredith who is the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director at the Solar Energy Industry Association SEIA, or as she is affectionately known, Leah with SEIA

To help answer all of these questions my guest today is low income energy advocate Laurel Peltier who Chairs the Energy Advocates coalition and has been instrumental in recent policy victories to help lower energy prices. She volunteers her time offering expert advice to people struggling to pay their energy bills, and she is kind enough to share that wisdom with all of us.

You can see Laurel's complete guide on how to lower your energy bills here

Sparkfund is a new company with a novel approach to bringing DERs to scale. I first heard about Sparkfund from⁠ an episode of David Roberts’ Volts podcast⁠ (which I highly recommend listening to as well), and given that Maryland very much needs to find ways of building new generation in-state quickly and cheaply, I immediately wanted to learn more. When I learned that Sparkfund is looking to work in Maryland, I of course wanted to have someone on this podcast to talk all about what this new approach will mean for our state. I am honored today to joined by Brendan Reed who is the Vice-President of Sparkfund to tell us all about it.

It is well established that the private organization PJM that oversees our grid makes proposed new energy projects wait in a queue for a very long time before allowing them to get built, longer than other grids. Some projects spend more than 5 years in this energy permitting purgatory. It is also generally understood by those who follow energy issues that by slowing down the buildout of new deployment PJM has contributed to increasing energy prices.

What we have today that is new and exciting is a report, ⁠Tackling the PJM Electricity Cost Crisis⁠, which quantifies exactly how much PJM’s mismanagement of their queue is costing all of us.

I am thrilled today to be joined by Sabine Chavin who is a Senior Associate at Synapse Energy, the research and consulting firm that conducted the study, and Julia Kortrey who is the Deputy Director of state policy at Evergreen Action, the non-profit who commissioned the study.

That book, The Lost Trees of Willow Ave, a story of climate and hope on one American Street, is now out and available for purchase. It is an emotionally gripping narrative with valuable and at times surprising insights on where the climate movement is headed.

I am overjoyed to have Mike on the show to talk about his new book.

This year legislative leaders in the House and Senate passed a package of three energy bills to address Maryland energy problems. Brittany Baker and I walked through these three bills as they were introduced in a previous episode, but I want to revisit them because a lot got changed and there were significant improvements and additions to the legislation, so in this episode I will go over everything in the leadership energy package and what the bills accomplish.

Unfortunately, there is legislation being considered this year, HB1556, that would delay the enforcement of both of these programs.

In that context, I wanted to talk with Maryland’s leading clean transportation expert and advocate, Lindsey Mendelson who is the Senior Transportation Campaign Representative at Maryland Sierra Club to talk about Advanced Clean Cars II and Advanced Clean Trucks, the benefits that these programs have for Maryland, and why it’s more important than ever to defend them.

To tell us all about it I am overjoyed to have on the show today the founder and executive director of the Maryland Citizens Health Initiative and my wonderful dad, Vincent DeMarco.

That’s why I am so thrilled that the respected modeling firm Center for Climate Strategies has just put out a new report based on a model they created of Maryland’s energy system. This report has so many helpful insights that are directly relevant to policies currently being considered by lawmakers in Annapolis.

For example, there is no publicly available modeling showing that Maryland needs new gas generation in order to meet growing energy demand, and spoiler alert, this report also does not find that Maryland needs new gas to meet growing demand.

To talk about that and the many other revelations from the model he created and the report he just released, my guest today is Tom Peterson, the founder and CEO of Center for Climate Strategies.

⁠To see the full CCS report click here⁠

A Renewable Energy Credit is really the building block that makes up our entire clean energy policy, and you really can’t understand our energy policies without a full understanding of what a REC is, and every kind of REC is different in its own unique way. This is a fun one and I hope you enjoy it.

We will talk about the three bills in the energy package that the Senate President and Speaker of the House put together, including the Renewable Energy Certainty Act, the Energy Resource Adequacy and Planning Act, and the next Generation Energy Act. We will also talk about the Governor’s ENERGIZE Act and review Delegate Charkoudian and Senator Brook’s Abundant, Affordable, Clean Energy Act.

To help us walk through all these bills I have a very special guest today: one of the great energy experts and advocates in Annapolis, Brittany Baker who is the Maryland Director at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

I’m thrilled to say that BEPS is currently in effect, regulating the 9,000 buildings over 35,000 square feet, reducing pollution today.

This year, the Maryland Department of the Environment has introduced a bill that would amend BEPS to allow building owners additional flexibility in complying with BEPS, SB256 HB49. The bill as introduced is pretty short, but MDE has negotiated with lawmakers a package of amendments that provide a great deal of additional flexibility and leeway for building owners. The bottom line is that if the bill passes as amended no building owner will have to do anything unless the investment pays for itself over a fixed period of time.

I’m grateful to MDE and the legislators for developing legislation that helps out building owners while maintaining the program.

To dive into exactly what changes are being proposed to BEPS, my guest today is Cliff Majersik with the Institute for Market Transformation. He was the policy lead in developing the first BEPS in the country, and has been involved in every other BEPS policy across the country. I can think of no one better to have this conversation with.

The legislation in the general assembly this year that has the greatest potential to reduce emissions from the transportation sector is the Transportation and Climate Alignment Act, SB0395 and HB0084 introduced by Senator Hester and Delegate Edelson. This bill passed both chambers last year but the clock ran out on it on Sine Die.

The Transportation and Climate Alignment Act has the potential to lower transportation costs, increase transit options, reduce congestion, cut climate pollution, and even lessen the burden on our electrical grid. It does all of this not by investing new money but by shifting how we invest existing transportation funds

This is one of my favorite conversations I have recorded on energy policy because it really demystifies an entity that has enormous control over our energy system. Going in, I thought I knew a lot about PJM, but I didn’t fully understand exactly what it’s doing until this conversation. I think you’ll get a lot out of it, and I wanted to share it on this podcast.

You can throw a dart at the map of Maryland and wherever the dart lands you will find stories of state funds being used to pay for damages caused by climate change. These costs are not optional. If a road floods regularly at high tide it will need repair, and right now the Maryland tax payer is paying for all of them. Climate damages are contributing to the projected budget deficit in Maryland

Thankfully, Maryland’s Senior US Senator Chris Van Hollen developed an innovative policy that will make the largest international fossil fuel companies pay for the cost of climate damages and ensure they cannot pass the cost on to consumers. He has introduced his Polluter Pays Act in Congress and that legislation has inspired a state version of the policy called the RENEW Act which Senator Hester, Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo and Delegate Boafo have introduced in Maryland.

Making polluters pay is extremely popular, with a full 70% of Marylanders supporting it. The policy has growing momentum and has been enacted in multiple other states, and it’s easy to see why. It provides immediate taxpayer relief at a time when the cost of living never seems to stop rising.

I am thrilled that Senator Van Hollen is my guest on Maryland Energy Talk to discuss how we can make polluters pay for the climate damages in Maryland

President Pro-Tem Augustine, along with Vice-Chair Crosby, was a leader in identifying this problem, developing a legislative solution, and getting the policy enacted.

In 2013 Maryland lawmakers created the STRIDE program to fix leaks in certain gas pipes. At the time, no one anticipated it would result in utilities building entirely new gas systems and costing Marylander tens of billions of dollars, but that is exactly what has happened

I sat down with Maryland’s People’s Counsel David Lapp to talk about how the STRIDE program got so far out of hand, and what can be done about it.

Every time I hear David Lapp talk about how much we are paying for STRIDE and how ineffective the program is I am floored. The numbers truly boggle the mind.

The quickest, most reliable way to get more in state electricity generation may not be what you think it is.

Sources:

Governor Moore's Climate Pollution Reduction Plan

Energy Information Administration Maryland State Profile Data

PSC Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard Report