PJM's Defenders Say the Grid Crisis Is a State Policy Fight, Not a Broken Market

A Different Diagnosis for the Same Grid

Since PJM's own chief executive acknowledged this week that the wholesale electricity market isn't working the way it should, a competing explanation for the region's rate hikes has surfaced: the real problem isn't PJM's governance, it's the states fighting inside it.

That argument comes from Todd Snitchler, president of the Electric Power Supply Association, the trade group representing competitive power generators, writing via RealClearEnergy. His piece landed as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission prepares to hold a technical conference this month examining whether PJM's stakeholder structure can move fast enough to keep up with surging demand.

Snitchler's case: PJM covers 13 states plus Washington, D.C., and those states don't want the same things. Pennsylvania exports roughly a quarter of everything it generates, according to Snitchler. Illinois, West Virginia, and Michigan also produce more power than they use. Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware are net importers, and that gap is widening as data centers multiply across their footprints.

Exporters vs. Importers

That split shapes everything about how states view the market. States rich in nuclear, gas, and coal generation want capacity pricing and transmission cost rules that reward what they've already built. States that have restricted natural gas drilling, leaned into renewables, or joined regional emissions-reduction programs are the ones importing power at higher prices, and their ratepayers are the ones absorbing the bills.

When Virginia pulls in costlier power from its neighbors, or Maryland households see double-digit rate increases, Snitchler argues that isn't proof the grid's rules are broken. It's the market doing exactly what markets do: putting a price tag on the consequences of each state's own energy choices, whether that's retiring plants early, subsidizing wind and solar with tax credits, or simply not building enough baseload generation to keep up with demand.

What's Actually Changed at PJM

Snitchler points to concrete progress on the operational side. PJM has cleared more than 60% of its interconnection backlog under a reformed study process, and the grid operator has opened new pathways to bring generation online faster. Those are real, measurable steps, and they cut against the narrative that PJM is simply too sclerotic to function.

It's a fair point, and it complicates the simpler story that PJM's size and stakeholder process are the whole problem. If the queue backlog is shrinking under existing rules, the case for a full governance overhaul gets harder to make on process grounds alone.

The Case for Skepticism

Snitchler runs a trade association whose members are the generators who benefit most when capacity prices stay high and transmission costs get allocated toward importing states. That doesn't make his facts wrong, but it does mean his framing serves his members' interests, and readers should weigh it that way.

The counterargument from critics pushing for governance reform, including some state utility regulators who've pressed FERC directly, is that PJM's 13-state, multi-stakeholder structure genuinely slows decision-making regardless of who's exporting or importing power. They want faster capacity auction reforms, clearer transmission cost allocation rules, and a process that doesn't require unanimous buy-in across states with opposite interests before anything changes. That's a legitimate structural critique, separate from the exporter-importer dynamic Snitchler describes, and it's the specific question FERC's technical conference is set up to examine.

Both things can be true at once. States do have genuinely different energy policies driving different cost outcomes, and PJM's governance process can still be too slow to adapt when 13 states with those competing interests all have to agree.

What Happens Next

FERC's technical conference this month is the venue where this argument gets tested against the record. Whether regulators side with Snitchler's read, that rate hikes reflect state policy choices working as intended, or with the governance critics pushing for structural change, will shape whether PJM's rules get rewritten or whether states like Maryland and Virginia are told their rate pain is simply the market pricing in decisions their own legislatures made.