POWER supports this sister climate justice project.
If we’re going to make the move off fossil fuel power plants that pollute our air and harm our health and climate, there’s a powerful but little-known corporate neighbor called PJM right in Valley Forge. They have a huge role to play. And they need to start seeing themselves as energy leaders accountable to communities.
That’s why we are working with PJM advocates to pull back the curtain on PJM Interconnection – the nation’s biggest power grid and energy market operator. PJM determines a lot about which sources of energy get paid to feed the electric grid and how much we all pay.
We’re out to motivate PJM’s 1,000 staff and leaders to transform our grid and energy markets to fully enable low-cost clean sources to power our lives.
Ready to learn more? Contact us!
PJM has been putting over $4 billion on power bills that people shouldn’t be paying.
One of the energy markets PJM runs, called the electricity “capacity” market, has continually overbought and overpaid owners of power plants for energy we don’t need – and charged customers for the excess. Across PJM’s 13-state region, it has been about $4.3 billion a year in unneeded costs, or about $67 a year on the average customer bill.
This is a problem PJM can and should fix. In fact, there are recommendations for doing just that pending before PJM this summer. Interested to help tell PJM to do the right thing and save residents money on our bills? Contact us.
Electricity customers are being charged to prop up & prolong uneconomic fossil fuel power plants
Across the 13-state PJM region, the majority of existing polluting coal and gas power plant units (smokestacks) are located within five miles of an environmental justice (EJ) community – a census tract in which more than 20 percent of residents live at or below the federal poverty level and/or more than 30 percent are people of color.
Here in Pennsylvania, there are 73 fossil fuel power plant units (smokestacks) within a mile of an EJ community, 50 directly within an EJ community. The PJM capacity market has continued to exacerbate pollution injustice by paying coal and gas power plants even though their power isn’t needed and is too expensive, keeping them going instead of making way for cleaner and lower-cost energy.
This is a problem PJM can and should fix. Contact us if you’d like to help!
The clean energy and jobs that can replace polluting & unjust fossil fuel power are stuck waiting…and waiting…at PJM
While some uneconomic fossil fuel power plants in Pennsylvania and across the PJM region are being paid to stick around and keep polluting, a vast reservoir of clean energy projects that could be powering us instead are stuck waiting, unable to proceed.
- 450 solar and solar hybrid projects are currently “active” in the “PJM Queue” for Pennsylvania, waiting for a go-ahead that they can interconnect to the power grid, so that construction can begin.
- If the solar and hybrid projects active in the PJM Queue today in Pennsylvania could all be built, it would support nearly 50,000 jobs on the construction, and create enough electricity to power 2.8 million homes.
- But clean energy projects in the PJM Queue wait at least a year, many wait multiple years, withering on the vine either because the process at PJM – or the grid itself – isn’t ready for the era of renewable energy development.
PJM is taking some steps to fix the Interconnection Queue processing problems, but there is a lot more leadership and urgency needed from PJM on the bigger transformation in transmission to ready our grid for a generation of dispersed clean energy sources replacing big polluting fossil fuel plants. That leadership is overdue and needed now.
Contact us if you’d like to help!