Over the past two years, electric distribution utility companies operating in the PJM Interconnection region have mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign, urging lawmakers to allow them to own and build power plants once again. 

As part of this effort, utilities – including Exelon, FirstEnergy, and PPL Electric – have held extensive private meetings with officials, lobbied for legislation, testified before public bodies, and mounted public-relations campaigns. EPI has compiled a timeline documenting these activities, including materials obtained through public records requests. 

This campaign – commonly referred to as “re-regulation” – would reverse restructuring policies adopted by PJM-region states in the late 1990s, which required utilities to divest their power plants and shifted electricity generation to competitive wholesale markets. Electric distribution utilities in states such as Maryland and Pennsylvania no longer own generation assets, unlike vertically integrated monopoly utilities elsewhere in the country that continue to own generation, transmission, and distribution under state regulatory oversight. Under restructuring, utilities retained their regulated monopoly over distribution but were largely prohibited from owning generation, which instead became subject to competitive procurement from independent power producers.

Re-regulation would allow utilities like Exelon, FirstEnergy, and PPL Electric to build and own power plants once again – and earn profits on those investments through regulated rates. Because the regulatory system guarantees returns on capital spending, bringing generation back into the rate base would directly expand the assets on which utilities earn profits. Allowing utilities to build and own power plants and recover their costs and profits through regulated rates would likely distort competition in PJM’s wholesale markets. Resources with guaranteed cost recovery can suppress market prices and crowd out independent power producers, discouraging investment by developers that bear full market risk. 

The push for re-regulation is unfolding amid turmoil in PJM’s capacity market, with unprecedented price shocks expected to raise electricity bills by hundreds of dollars per year for many customers. The surge reflects tightening supply, rising demand due to data center development, and market bottlenecks that have delayed thousands of projects like renewables and battery storage. Utilities have pointed to this volatility as justification for returning to regulated generation ownership, arguing it would bring stability. Consumer advocates, however, warn that shifting the risk of power plant investments from utility shareholders onto captured customers could saddle households with expensive and potentially unnecessary assets for decades to come. 

Lead photo credit: Acroterion, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.