It’s no secret that it costs more and more to keep the lights on in New Jersey.
And for those who heat with electricity in the winter or depend on air conditioning in the summer, monthly utility bills are increasingly becoming unaffordable.
The growing crisis was a central issue during the gubernatorial campaign, with Democrat Mikie Sherrill promising as a candidate that she would declare a state of emergency on utility costs and freeze utility rates on “Day One as New Jersey’s next governor.”
In fact, New Jersey’s energy infrastructure has essentially been underdeveloped for years, observed Clinton J. Andrews, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy at Rutgers. That shortage of capacity is a big reason why New Jersey utility customers “are being hit with these crazy cost spikes.”
Part of the problem is not just PJM’s auction process, he said, but its inaction on adding proposed new projects to the grid.
“All new generation needs to be approved by PJM before it can be connected,” he pointed out. But the regional transmission organization hasn’t been able to keep up with the backlog of generation requests because they don’t have enough engineers to do the power flow calculations, Andrews noted.
“If we worked through the backlog, we would have plenty of generation,” he said.
BPU officials confirmed new generation is not coming online fast enough.
“PJM faces a backlog of roughly 140 gigawatts of clean‑energy projects stuck in the interconnection queue,” said a BPU spokesman. “Recent reliability rules aimed at ensuring grid stability during extreme weather have also tightened supply.”
Meeting energy demand, though, is always complicated. Energy planners have always tried to project future demand and then try to figure out what they need to meet that demand.
“You want to be building enough ahead of demand to meet that demand,” Andrews explained.
Going wild on building unneeded new generation, however, can also strike ratepayers deep in their pocketbooks. That is what happened in 1981, when Public Service Electric & Gas Co. cancelled a twin reactor to its Hope Creek nuclear plant in in Lower Alloways Creek, after millions had already been sunk into the project. The utility said reduced electricity demands and excessive costs had ultimately rendered the abandoned Hope Creek 2 unnecessary.
Some of the project’s costs were later passed on to utility customers.
Finding places to build new nuclear power plants in a densely populated state like New Jersey, which is now part of Sherrill’s energy initiative, is also difficult, said Andrews.