We are a group of Maryland legislators writing to urge you to use your voting powers and influence at PJM to address the increasing pressure on electricity rates and reliability resulting from large load additions and their projected growth. Large load additions, like data centers, mostly located outside of Maryland, have already increased costs for customers in Maryland and those increases will rise drastically in future years without significant policy changes at PJM. While data centers play an important role in national security and economic development, their growth must be incorporated in a fair way that ensures their costs are not unfairly socialized to Maryland ratepayers.
We are a group of Maryland legislators writing to urge you to use your voting powers and influence at PJM to address the increasing pressure on electricity rates and reliability resulting from large load additions and their projected growth. Large load additions, like data centers, mostly located outside of Maryland, have already increased costs for customers in Maryland and those increases will rise drastically in future years without significant policy changes at PJM. While data centers play an important role in national security and economic development, their growth must be incorporated in a fair way that ensures their costs are not unfairly socialized to Maryland ratepayers.
To: President & CEO Olivier; President & CEO Anthony; President Myers; CEO Cox:
We are a group of Maryland legislators writing to urge you to use your voting powers and influence at PJM to address the increasing pressure on electricity rates and reliability resulting from large load additions and their projected growth. Large load additions, like data centers, mostly located outside of Maryland, have already increased costs for customers in Maryland and those increases will rise drastically in future years without significant policy changes at PJM. While data centers play an important role in national security and economic development, their growth must be incorporated in a fair way that ensures their costs are not unfairly socialized to Maryland ratepayers.
PJM’s independent market monitor estimates that existing and projected data center demand growth increased the costs of the last two capacity market auctions by $16.6 billion. Further, over the past two years, PJM has obtained federal approval for regional transmission upgrades of approximately $12 billion primarily to support data center demands. More than half of those costs will be socialized to customers across PJM. Existing customers also are paying for local transmission projects to support data centers and increased energy costs.
PJM has several ongoing processes that will affect whether large load additions pay their full costs and impact reliable service for existing customers, including the current Critical Issues Fast Path (CIFP). In that process, we have asked all the presenters to explain how their proposals protect Maryland residential customers from experiencing higher costs because of large load growth, while also protecting existing customers from having their service disrupted. PJM also is reviewing requests from utilities to include massive, additional new large load in its forecast for 2026. That forecast will significantly impact future capacity market auctions and transmission planning—and therefore costs for customers.
As a public service company with government-granted benefits of an exclusive franchise and government protection from competition, you have a special obligation to advance the interests of your existing Maryland customers at PJM. That obligation includes advancing policies at PJM that ensure that your Maryland customers do not bear the massive costs associated with data center load growth, real or projected, as well as ensuring that safe and reliable service for existing customers is not jeopardized as a result of data center load growth. It means supporting policies that assign data center costs to data centers, reliability risks to the large loads creating those risks, and ensuring speculative and uncertain forecasts of data center load do not become a vehicle to increase existing customer costs and risks of stranded investments.
Please also note that Public Utilities Article §7-108 requires that you submit a record of your PJM votes to the Maryland Public Service Commission. This ensures transparency and accountability for how those votes affect Maryland ratepayers.
As an initial request, we ask that you provide a summary of the positions that you are supporting in CIFP and large load adjustment processes underway at PJM. Specifically:
Customers are experiencing an energy affordability crisis. Substantial increases in distribution rates for gas and electric service over the last decade are now being compounded by added costs resulting from large load growth—costs that will grow drastically if data centers and data center projections are allowed to shift the billions in investments necessary to support their overwhelming energy needs to residential customers. Your influence and votes in the PJM processes are necessary to prevent residential customers from subsidizing actual or forecasted large load growth. We appreciate your timely response.