If a legislator in Trenton drops a nonsensical bill, should it become public policy? Last week, NJ Assembly Democrats introduced a bill (A5902) to explore leaving the PJM Interconnection LLC, the non-profit regional transmission operator that New Jersey helped form (that’s the J in PJM) in 1927.

That’s right, instead of examining new energy sources to help meet demand like NY and PA are with nuclear, the NJBPU and Legislatiors have been trying to blame PJM for the latest energy price increases suggesting again that we should leave the grid system, as if that would solve our problems.

PJM reminded the legislators that despite their press releases that say otherwise, we are importing a significant amount of energy just to keep the power on. And even if everything proposed was built and came on line, we would still be short of what we need:

That’s right, last week alone we bought 8GW, or 48% of our power from outside of New Jersey.

So while all of our neighbors recognize that the solution is to build new generation, NJ politicians have decided that instead of solving the problem we are going to blame the organization that makes sure we don’t have blackouts. And because of them, we have less leverage to go in another direction as instead of having 100% in state energy generation, we are down to 45% at this point.

Lets be clear, this idea of leaving PJM isn’t new and does nothing to solve that problem. In fact AENJ did a report card breaking down why it was a bad idea way back in 2021, which is just as relevant today:

What makes our leaders think we can do it by ourselves any better than this, especially if they won’t recognize and address the actual problem we have? Because the problem is basic: we need more power. The solution is simple: we need to build more generation.

Yet unfortunately, time after time we see proposals like this Trenton that make it abundantly clear that NJ doesn’t really want to solve the problem.