Pennsylvanians could soon be starved of electricity in a state with virtually limitless energy resources.
Pennsylvanians could soon be starved of electricity in a state with virtually limitless energy resources.
P ennsylvania is the birthplace of America’s global energy dominance. At the start of the 20th century, it was producing more than half the world’s oil. It’s where Standard Oil Trust and the Rockefeller fortune arose, hot on the heels of Pittsburgh’s mighty Carnegie Steel Company. And today, it sits atop the Marcellus Shale, one of the planet’s richest reserves of natural gas.
Yet the Keystone State is hurtling toward a major electricity scarcity crisis, thanks to the policies of Governor Josh Shapiro, the Biden-Harris administration, and their fellow Democrats, such as Senator Bob Casey. Because of those policies Pennsylvanians could soon be starved of electricity in a state brimming with energy resources.
PJM Interconnection, which operates the grid in Pennsylvania and in more than a dozen neighboring states, has been sounding the alarm. It is forecasting a massive wave of power-plant closures, driven by Biden-Harris policies, at the same time that demand for electricity is surging in part because of the administration’s reckless push to electrify transportation and household appliances.
According to PJM, up to 58 gigawatts (GW) of coal and natural-gas plants are at risk of closing by 2030. This figure represents more than 20 percent of PJM’s total power generation capacity — equivalent to losing 58 average-size nuclear plants. (There are just under 100 nuclear plants in operation in the U.S. today.) Simultaneously, electricity demand in the PJM area could rise by 25 percent by 2030.
“I think the PJM has a real crisis looming on its hands,” Pennsylvania state senator Joe Pittman said recently. “I see no real reliable plan to replace the megawatts that are due to come offline in the next few short years.”
The combination of soaring demand and shrinking supply spells skyrocketing electricity prices and deadly blackouts for Pennsylvania and other states in the PJM area. Indeed, in a recent PJM capacity auction for 2025–26, prices soared a staggering 833 percent. As a result, Pennsylvanians’ electricity bills could double in the next year, and that’s just the beginning. (Capacity auction costs are about 10 percent of the typical electricity bill.)
One major factor behind these power-plant closures is the climate policies of the Biden-Harris administration. New Environmental Protection Agency regulations require existing coal and new natural-gas plants to use carbon capture and storage to eliminate 95 percent of carbon emissions. The EPA has made clear that without a change in administration, it will implement a similar rule for existing natural-gas plants next year.
That is already killing investment in coal and natural-gas plants, at the very moment that the need for reliable fossil plants is becoming more urgent than ever. The feasibility of carbon-capture technology at utility scale is still speculative, and so are its costs. Moreover, compliance with the EPA rule would require a massive expansion of storage facilities for carbon-transport pipelines. That is another speculative technology, the construction of which would be entirely beyond the control of the regulated power plants. The EPA’s rosy estimates about how quickly and easily such a pipeline infrastructure could be built have zero credibility; pipelines are not within the jurisdiction of EPA or the expertise of anybody who works at EPA.
In a recent federal court filing, PJM and its sister regional transmission operations (RTOs) warned that the new EPA rules are “not workable” and will force power plants to close at an even more rapid rate in the years ahead. In combination with other misguided federal policies, the EPA rule makes maintaining and building these plants prohibitively risky for investors. Sure enough, proposals for large new coal and natural-gas plants have virtually vanished in the PJM area. Financing for existing power plants is also at risk. In its court filing, PJM warns of “the chilling impact these collective rules will have on the investment required to retain and maintain existing generation units that are needed to provide key reliability attributes and grid services.”
It doesn’t matter what Governor Shapiro or Vice President Harris say now about fracking. Their policies are killing the natural-gas economy of Pennsylvania, just when Pennsylvanians need it most.
For the foreseeable future, coal and natural gas are essential for maintaining an adequate supply of reliable electricity in America. Proponents of renewable energy add up the maximum power output of all the new solar plants being proposed as “proof” that renewables are coming to the rescue. But maximum power output is an irrelevant figure for an intermittent and unpredictable energy source. Grid operators need to know that they can power the entire grid when solar and wind are at their lowest output.
According to PJM, “renewable generation . . . represented as much as 118% of the [PJM] load . . . and as little as 3% of the [PJM] load.” That means that even when the grid has 30 percent or 50 percent renewables, grid operators will still have to find enough nonrenewable power to supply 97 percent of grid requirements.
In any case, only a small percentage of proposed renewable-energy projects are ever completed. PJM estimates that renewable-energy projects in the “interconnection queue” have a completion rate of just 5 percent to 10 percent, far below the 50 percent to 60 percent that PJM’s CEO says would be needed to meet future demand. In a 2023 letter to PJM, Governor Shapiro acknowledged that under the current system, the large amount of retiring fossil energy “cannot be replaced in a timely manner.” But he blamed PJM for the slow pace of project interconnections.
In fact, Shapiro has only himself and his fellow Democrats, including Senator Casey, to blame for the woefully inadequate completion rate of projects in the interconnection queue. They Inflation Reduction Act subsidies they championed are flooding the grid with an overwhelming amount of solar and wind, when a much more diverse energy mix is needed for grid stability. The chaotic deployment of subsidized solar and wind is making the grid increasingly difficult to operate, inflating the largely fictitious nominal capacity of the grid while reducing its real “accredited capacity.” Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration’s rollback of Trump-era permitting reforms means that even renewable-energy projects face needless delays.
Undaunted, Shapiro is doubling down on self-defeating climate policies, pushing for a Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Act, a Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard, and adoption of the regional cap-and-trade scheme known as RGGI. As the Commonwealth Foundation argues in a new report, Pennsylvanians should reject these initiatives, and instead embrace energy abundance as a model.
Indeed, given the toxic interaction of IRA subsidies with the market structure of Regional Transmission Organizations like PJM, it may be time for Pennsylvania to consider leaving PJM altogether, as the Commonwealth Foundation suggests, and go back to the vertically integrated utility model that has kept residential electricity 30 percent cheaper in resource-poor Florida than in resource-rich Pennsylvania.
The irony is that Pennsylvania has more natural-gas reserves than almost any other state. But the Biden-Harris administration’s ban on liquified-natural-gas exports has helped to depress natural-gas prices, at the same time as its other policies are driving up the price of electricity. That is a double whammy for Pennsylvanians who are bearing the brunt of the Biden-Harris administration’s war on American energy.
In its court filing, PJM — a semipublic nonprofit whose sole job is to maintain grid reliability — accused the EPA of ignoring the energy requirements of Pennsylvania and its neighboring states. Unfortunately, ignoring Americans’ energy requirements is this administration’s policy. Electricity prices have already risen 50 percent in Pennsylvania since the start of this administration, and are set to go much higher still. Pennsylvanians — and Americans — should wake up before it’s too late.