Assemblyman Lou Greenwald was among the lawmakers who appeared before the Board of Public Utilities Friday to rail about energy rate hikes. (Hal Brown for New Jersey Monitor)
Assembly Democrats aimed displeasure over rising electricity rates at grid operator PJM Interconnection in testimony before the Board of Public Utilities Friday.
Several lawmakers — including Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Middlesex), Majority Leader Lou Greenwald (D-Camden), and a handful of first-term lawmakers in competitive districts — said PJM has favored a fossil-heavy energy mix to the detriment of New Jersey’s renewable goals.
“PJM has prioritized dirty energy and has consistently worked against our agenda to create clean, affordable energy right here in this state. PJM has consistently placed profits to dirty out-of-state energy producers ahead of the cost to the people of New Jersey,” Coughlin told the board.
Lawmakers delivered their comments at a quarterly meeting where the board takes public testimony, which it does not take at its regular meetings.
Lawmakers’ comments come after a series of rate hikes and uncharacteristically cold weather caused electricity bills to surge this winter and just months before another hike that will add about $25 to ratepayers’ monthly bills takes effect in June.
Those increases, the result of a basic generation service auction held in February, will kick in just days before New Jersey’s primaries. The governorship and all 80 seats in the Assembly are up for a vote this year.
The timing and the severity of the looming increases — which come after a combination of auction prices and separate rate-setting by the Board of Public Utilities caused double-digit increases last year — threaten to undercut Democratic messaging on affordability, which the party said was its chief focus after 2021’s close gubernatorial election.
PJM, the grid operator for New Jersey and 12 other states, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in an earlier statement provided Thursday, a spokesman for the firm said dwindling supply and spikes in demand were driving up the price of electricity.
“New Jersey is already an intensive net importer of power and will likely continue to be a net importer in the near future. PJM’s capacity market price is expressing this supply-demand challenge with higher pricing,” said PJM spokesman Dan Lockwood.
New electricity generation projects in New Jersey have not filled gaps left by the closure of existing plants, including the 2018 decommissioning of the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station.
Lockwood added that regulations on the sale of electricity and the repeated hurdles faced by renewable projects in New Jersey — chiefly its offshore wind projects, nearly all of which are stalled after a federal permitting freeze — had contributed to the increases.
“Not all of PJM’s footprint is experiencing the price increases that New Jersey consumers have been experiencing in recent years,” he said.
Democrats’ criticism is in line with talking points recently circulated among their members. Those talking points, first reported by conservative blogger Matt Rooney, leveled criticism at PJM, the Board of Public Utilities, and state Republicans, who have broadly opposed wind projects.
Republicans, meanwhile, have blamed Gov. Phil Murphy’s renewables-focused energy policy for rate hikes. Renewable sources like solar and wind accounted for roughly 8% of the state’s electricity generation in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and nearly 90% of that electricity was produced through solar.
“We need the other side of the aisle to commit to not decommissioning power plants until we have the energy ready to replace the energy lost. Solar and wind simply cannot power the entire grid at the moment. Mandates are crushing us,” Assemblyman Michael Torrissi (R-Burlington) said in a statement.
Christine Guhl-Sadovy, the Board of Public Utilities president, said PJM market rules, which excluded some plants from capacity auctions, and increased demand spurred by AI data centers in other states on PJM’s grid had contributed to the spikes.
“We understand that this is not a comfort to people who need to pay their bills,” she said during Friday’s meeting.
Though most lawmakers who testified focused their criticism on PJM, the board did not entirely escape their scrutiny. Assemblyman Al Abdelaziz (D-Passaic) blamed board members for allowing rate increases.
“One of the very first actions I was forced to take was to stand against greedy utility companies prioritizing profit above all else. With all due respect, the BPU has allowed energy suppliers and utility companies to gouge New Jersey residents. It is completely unacceptable,” he said.
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