It’s time for another annual reflection from CUB’s Consumers for a Better Grid Campaign. With millions of customers dealing with electricity price spikes, 2025 was a busy year advocating for consumers at PJM Interconnection and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). As part of that mission, the campaign held four media briefings, presented at or attended eight conferences, intervened in at least 10 legal cases, and was quoted by at least 25 different media outlets. Here’s more detail on what we tackled this year…
Consumer education
Many people have never heard of PJM Interconnection, but it manages the nation’s largest power grid–from northern Illinois all the way to the East Coast–and it has a major impact on electric reliability and affordability for 67 million customers across the country. So educating consumers about PJM is important. More and more grassroots groups and organizations across the PJM region have been reaching out for information and ways to engage with everyday consumers about this issue. To respond to this surge in interest, we recorded our PJM 101 briefing, which to date has over 1,000 views! In order to help make PJM material more accessible, Karen Tolentino, the Clean Energy Outreach and Communications Coordinator for CUB Español, re-recorded the video in Spanish.
Legislative victories
After years of effort, Maryland was the first state to pass a bill requiring utilities to report the votes they take at PJM–and Delaware and New Jersey soon followed.
Campaign Manager Clara Summers has testified on the bill for the last two years—it was exciting to see it pass! Hopefully we’ll see more states pass this pro-consumer legislation.
In Illinois, the CUB team was instrumental in passing the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act. This sweeping energy legislation will help counteract high prices from PJM by bringing more batteries online and promoting energy efficiency, among other strong provisions.
Litigation
We intervened in at least 10 legal dockets at FERC, the Department of Energy, and in the courts on issues ranging from capacity market management, improving transmission planning, and protecting the ability of FERC to impose penalties on bad actors.
There were a number of topics we worked on this year, but here are some of the biggest…
Decoding the broken capacity market—past, present, and future
Past and present: If you were plugged in last summer, you may remember that PJM’s capacity market produced record-high prices that would start to hit in June of this year. We worked to ensure consumers were prepared for the upcoming price spike (if you need more information and tips about spiking power prices, please visit our Help Center).
In two Facebook Lives, Clara and Annie Warnock, Bilingual Consumer Rights Specialist, gave out important consumer information about the price spikes at the beginning and end of the summer.
Future: Unfortunately, high prices will continue for several years. In July, the results of the 2026-27 capacity auction were announced–and once again the auction resulted in a record-high price. Clara was ready to break it down for the public, and Sarah talked through the results on WBEZ. In our statement, we wrote, “While we are relieved that the negotiated price cap prevented capacity costs from soaring even higher, this record price spike is unacceptable.” In December, the auction results for 2027-2028 hit the cap once again. As long as the interconnection queue is broken and data centers are unmanaged, we will need the cap to be extended.
Holding data centers accountable for their own costs
In August, the PJM Board began an accelerated stakeholder process to deal with overwhelming data center demand. Consumers for a Better Grid and NRDC teamed up for a media briefing to warn that PJM states could get hit with forced blackouts and $163 billion in electricity capacity costs due to unmanaged data center growth. For the ultimate vote, CUB Illinois joined the Maryland Office of Peoples Counsel, Pennsylvania Office of the Consumer Advocate, and other consumer advocates to introduce a proposal that would protect consumers from data center costs and reliability issues. None of the final 12 proposals reached the threshold to pass, however, since this was an advisory vote, the PJM Board will be making all the decisions. We urged the Board in a Crain’s Chicago Business op-ed to protect consumers by prioritizing reliability and affordability. The Board could announce their decision any day now.
Sarah and Clara show off their energy nerd fashion at the PJM Annual Meeting.
Fighting dirty power plants
In June, the US Department of Energy ordered two retiring plants—Eddystone in PJM and Campbell in MISO—to keep operating, no matter how much it cost consumers. After an accelerated stakeholder process at PJM, we brought the fight to the Department of Energy alongside other consumer and environmental advocates.
We know this has been a hard year of high prices. Rest assured that the Consumers for a Better Grid team is working hard to advocate on behalf of consumers at all levels—state, regional, and federal—to achieve a clean, affordable energy future. Thank you for being the reason we do this work.
