Posted: October 31, 2025, 12:50 pm

SOMEBODY’S GOT TO PAY

We might have to start a weekly column with a title something along the line of, “who’s paying today”. This week’s addition is being pulled from an article in Utility Dive Under the “who’s paying today” we’ve included plenty on transmission over time, but his addition probably falls more in the capacity bucket. To summarize, earlier this summer a few plants near Philadelphia scheduled to close, within the PJM footprint, were ordered to stay online for reliability of the grid. FERC approved a plan PJM submitted to allow the owners to recover the costs of being forced to operate these plants which, as might be anticipated, drew sharp criticism from those that might share in the costs, with one of those being East Kentucky Power Cooperative and the Kentucky Attorney General. Their argument was that the PJM capacity market cleared plenty of excess generation, and not everyone should have to pay for what is a regional issue. Just for good measure, they added, “LSEs who actively manage the resource adequacy needs of the load they are obligated to serve should not be penalized by being forced to pay socialized costs that are driven by the other LSEs’ lack of active resource management,”. This isn’t the first go around with this, as there was a similar arguments as plants have been asked to operate pasts scheduled closed dates. As we’ve pointed out, capacity markets, and their make up has come under increasing scrutiny and this isn’t going to alleviate that anytime soon.

HOMEWORK CHECK

Speaking of PJM and capacity….for readers not familiar, PJM is an acronym for Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection. We point this out because recently there has been no bigger critic of PJM than the state of Pennsylvania, or the P. We’ve mentioned in the past, the current market cap of capacity pricing is a result of some sharp criticism of the rising pricing mechanisms by PA Gov Shapiro. This week our friends at ARIPPA who do tremendous work on legislative updates, among other things, gave us a heads up on a bipartisan bill that may start working it’s way through the state legislature.

We tried to come up with a good analogy. In a totally 100% hypothetical, there’s no way this happened scenario, imagine your homework being so bad that Principal Stecker (just for namesake) suggests you turn it into him for review before passing it along to your teacher.

NEW DAY FOR NUKES

It seems the “renaissance” of nuclear energy is continuing. This week the DOE announced a strategic partnership with Cameco, and Brookfield owned Westinghouse for up to $80 billion for construction of new nuclear power reactors. The deal calls for ten reactors to be built with the DOE arranging financing and helping facilitate the permitting process. The deal is somewhat complicated, but there appears to be a mechanism where Westinghouse could be spun off by Brookfield with the US participating in the profits.

Interestingly enough, Westinghouse is owned by Brookfield out of bankruptcy. It doesn’t seem that long ago, 1997, Westinghouse was one of the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In March of that year, Bethlehem Steel, Texaco, Westinghouse, and Venator (then known as Woolworth; name changed to Foot Locker in 2001) were replaced by Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Travelers Group, and Wal-Mart Stores.