Last week, the BPU announced that they certified the 2026 electricity auction results. While what they put out was a standard press release, this paragraph in their statement caught our attention:

It is disingenuous to assert that the last several auction results were not the consequences of state policy that slashed in-state baseload generation by more than 30%. Purposeful policy put New Jersey in this place…period.

And let’s look at those “stable rates.” The fact is, recent PJM electricity auctions have shown three years in a row of huge price jumps. Basically, the cost of keeping enough power available for the grid has gotten much more expensive.

• 2025/2026 auction (held in 2024): Prices skyrocketed — about 8 times higher than the year before, jumping from around $29 to about $270.
• 2026/2027 auction (held July 2025): Prices climbed even more, hitting a new record of about $329.
• 2027/2028 auction (held December 2025): Prices stayed at the maximum allowed level, rising slightly again to about $333, which is still historically high.

The bottom line is that for three straight years, PJM capacity prices have surged to the record levels and those increases are due to policy and political decisions – anyone who says they are “surprised” has been living in a cocoon under a very large rock sealed in an impermeable vault protected with kryptonite.

It’s time to flip the switch from “don’t blame us there’s nothing we can do” and power forward with building all additional baseload generation available, because that is the only way we will start to dig out of the hole the BPU and state of NJ has helped put us in.