PJM Opens Power Grid Applications for First Time in Four Years, Fielding 800-Plus Projects
Why It Matters
The electricity market serving Maryland and more than a dozen other states is accepting new power generation applications for the first time since 2022, a development that carries significant consequences for electricity affordability, grid reliability, and the region’s ability to meet rapidly growing energy demand driven largely by data center expansion.
PJM Interconnection, the Montgomery County-based organization that oversees wholesale electricity supply across roughly 65 million customers in 13 states, announced the restart of its interconnection review process last week after a four-year pause.
What Happened
PJM halted its review queue in 2022 after a surge of applications — primarily from renewable energy developers — overwhelmed an approval process originally designed to handle large conventional plants, not hundreds of smaller distributed energy sources. The backlog created what one energy researcher described as an operational deadlock, where updates to a single project forced re-evaluation of hundreds of others behind it.
The revamped process replaces the former first-come, first-served model with a first-ready, first-served framework. Applicants must now demonstrate financial commitments and confirmed site control before their projects advance — a change intended to weed out speculative submissions and accelerate review timelines. Projects will also be evaluated in clusters rather than sequentially, allowing reviewers to assess overlapping grid impacts simultaneously.
David Mills, who formally became PJM’s president and CEO last Friday after serving in an interim role since January, said the diversity of generation types in the new queue was encouraging. “This is good news because we need all the generation we can get,” Mills said in a public statement.
By the Numbers
PJM reported 811 total project applications in the new queue, representing a combined proposed generating capacity of approximately 220 gigawatts — exceeding the 180 gigawatts PJM currently manages. Specific project categories include:
- Natural gas: 157 applications totaling nearly 106 gigawatts
- Battery storage: 349 applications totaling roughly 67 gigawatts
- Nuclear: 27 applications totaling 18 gigawatts
- Remaining projects span solar, wind, hydroelectric, and other sources — including one fusion energy plant in Virginia, the first of its kind to seek PJM grid access
PJM projects total electricity consumption in its service territory will grow by nearly 70% over the next two decades. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved a price-cap extension Thursday, limiting capacity auction bids to $325 per megawatt day through the 2029–2030 delivery period.
Of the projects that cleared PJM’s process since 2020, only 23 of 103 gigawatts approved actually entered service. A separate 54 gigawatts cleared the process but have not begun construction, with permitting cited as the primary obstacle. Among applications in the queue prior to the pause, 74% were ultimately withdrawn.
Zoom Out
The PJM queue reopening reflects a national tension between surging electricity demand and constrained supply. Data centers built to support artificial intelligence development are the primary driver of new load growth, and states across the PJM footprint are competing to attract those facilities for their economic benefits while grappling with their infrastructure costs.
In January, the governors of PJM member states and the Trump administration reached agreement on a set of principles to guide electricity market reform, including the capacity price cap extension now approved by federal regulators.
Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, said investor response to the queue restart signals restored confidence in PJM’s process. “That bodes well for the future of the market, which ultimately is good for consumers,” he said. Abe Silverman, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute, offered a more cautious view, noting that the prolonged pause likely eliminated viable renewable projects that could not survive years of uncertainty.
The infrastructure pressures facing Maryland’s energy sector come as the state has also navigated other significant infrastructure disruptions, including a recent cyberattack that knocked a state property search tool offline for nearly two weeks.
What’s Next
Application details will remain confidential until submissions are formally accepted. PJM has indicated the cluster-based review methodology should improve processing speed and predictability compared to the previous approach. Regulators, developers, and state officials will be watching whether the reformed process translates the large volume of applications into actual construction — a conversion rate that has historically been low. PJM’s vice president of planning noted publicly that permitting delays, not the interconnection process itself, represent the primary barrier to bringing approved projects online, pointing to state-level permitting reform as a key factor in unlocking stalled energy development.