TL;DR — What This Is Really About

The Problem Is Not the Average Day. It’s the Worst Day.

Electricity is not like water in a tank. You cannot store a month’s worth of it and draw it down as needed. It has to be generated at the exact moment it is consumed — and the amount you need varies wildly from hour to hour and day to day.

On a mild spring morning in New Jersey, the demand for electricity is modest. People are at work, the temperature is comfortable, and most appliances are idle. But on a still, brutal afternoon in late July — 95 degrees, no breeze, the whole state reaching for the thermostat at the same time — demand can spike to two or three times that baseline, within a matter of hours.

That spike is not predictable with precision. One day the high is 80 degrees. The next day it hits 95. Nobody knows exactly which day will be the worst day of the year until it arrives. And on that day, every air conditioner, every refrigerator, every industrial cooler in the region is running at full capacity simultaneously.

This is the fundamental engineering challenge of an electric grid: you must be able to meet the demand of the worst day — not the average day. If you can only meet average demand, you will fail on the days that matter most.

For decades, New Jersey met this challenge with a simple solution: we owned enough local power plants to handle the worst day ourselves. Coal plants, oil plants, a nuclear station, gas peakers — they sat ready. On the mild days they ran at partial capacity or idled. On the brutal days they ran flat out. The lights stayed on.

Then we destroyed them.

What We Lost — And Why It Cannot Be Replaced by Wind and Sun

Between 2017 and 2022, New Jersey permanently shut down and demolished a series of major power plants. The Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station — the oldest nuclear plant in America, capable of powering 600,000 homes around the clock — went dark in 2018. The B.L. England plant at Beesley’s Point in Cape May County, a 450-megawatt facility that had served South Jersey for over 50 years, closed in 2019 and its smokestack was imploded in 2023. Seven plants in total. 2.7 gigawatts of generating capacity. Gone permanently.

The official answer to the question “what replaces them?” was: solar panels, wind turbines, and offshore wind farms.

Here is the problem — and it comes down to one word: dispatchable. A dispatchable power plant is one that can be turned on, turned up, or turned down on command, at any hour, in any weather. You call it, it responds. Coal, gas, oil, and nuclear are all dispatchable. The grid operator can pick up the phone — metaphorically speaking — and say “we need full power right now” and the plant delivers. Solar and wind are not dispatchable. Nobody commands the sun. Nobody commands the wind. They produce when nature allows and go quiet when it doesn’t. That is not a criticism — it is simply physics.

And here is where physics becomes a crisis. The worst day on the grid — that 95-degree July afternoon when every air conditioner in the state is running at once — is typically a day of high pressure, low wind, and hazy skies. The sun is strong but fading by mid-afternoon. The air is dead calm. Demand is at its absolute peak. And the non-dispatchable sources that were supposed to replace the demolished plants are doing the least they will do all week. You cannot call a wind farm and say “we need you at full power right now — it’s 95 degrees and the grid is failing.” You can say that to a gas plant. You could have said it to Oyster Creek. You cannot say it to a field of solar panels on a still July afternoon. And you certainly cannot say it to a smokestack that has been imploded into rubble.

But once again, offshore wind is not dispatchable. We cannot just look at the total megawatts on paper and declare the problem solved. A wind farm that produces 2,400 megawatts delivers when the wind blows — not when it’s needed; on a still July afternoon it produces close to zero, the exact moment the grid needs it most. Megawatts on a blueprint do not keep the lights on. Only megawatts that show up on command do that. And offshore wind, like all wind, shows up when it wants to — not when we need it to.

Enter PJM — The Energy Insurance Company

When New Jersey realized it could no longer guarantee its own power on the worst days, it became dependent on an organization called PJM Interconnection. PJM manages the electric grid for 13 states and Washington D.C. — 67 million people from Chicago to the Carolinas. Think of PJM as an energy insurance company.

Here is how insurance works: you pay a premium every month so that when something goes wrong — a car accident, a house fire — someone is there to cover the loss. You hope you never need to make a claim. But the premium is the price of the guarantee.

PJM works the same way, but instead of paying claims in dollars, it pays in electricity. Every year PJM runs an auction. Power suppliers across 13 states bid to guarantee they will have electricity available on the worst days. Utilities — including New Jersey’s PSE&G, JCP&L, and Atlantic City Electric — buy that guarantee on behalf of their customers. The cost gets passed to every electric bill in the region, buried in the rate with no line item and no explanation.

When New Jersey had its own plants, it needed less of this insurance. When New Jersey demolished its plants, it needed more — much more. And here is the iron law of insurance: when the risk goes up, the premium goes up.

In the most recent auction before the plant closures fully registered in the market, PJM’s capacity auction cost a total of $2.2 billion across all 13 states. After the closures — after the market absorbed the reality of what had been lost — the next auction cost $14.7 billion. The same auction. One year later. A 567% increase in total cost. For an average customer, the hidden capacity charge on their monthly bill went from about $3 per month to $15 per month in a single year. No explanation on the bill. No press conference. No admission of cause.

Now Shift Your Focus From New Jersey to PJM

New Jersey alone destroyed 2.7 gigawatts of dispatchable energy. Now, across PJM’s 13 states, another 40 gigawatts are scheduled to retire by 2030.

New Jersey used to produce more electricity than it consumed — it was a net exporter as recently as 2017. That is no longer true. Today New Jersey imports a growing share of its electricity from out of state, and that dependency grows every year as more plants are retired. At this point it no longer makes sense to think of New Jersey as having its own independent power grid — it doesn’t. What replaced it is a dependency on 67 million people’s shared infrastructure stretching from Chicago to the Carolinas. So when we ask what is planned next for New Jersey’s power supply, the honest answer is: there is no “New Jersey power supply” anymore. There is only PJM. And the same policy that demolished New Jersey’s plants is now playing out across all 13 states simultaneously.

PJM’s own grid operator has officially projected a supply shortfall beginning June 2027 — the first in its history. In the most recent capacity auction, even at the maximum allowed price, PJM came up 6,625 megawatts short of what it needed. The scorekeeper is saying the game is being lost.

Where Green Energy Goes, Blackouts Follow

To be precise: it is not the solar panels and wind turbines that cause blackouts. The panels and turbines are not the villain. The villain is the policy decision to destroy reliable, dispatchable power plants before adequate replacements exist — and to pretend that wind and solar are a like-for-like substitute when they are not.

They are not a substitute on the worst days. They are not a substitute at 4pm on a 95-degree afternoon when the wind is not blowing. They are not a substitute when demand spikes unpredictably and the grid needs a plant that will simply turn on when told to.

This pattern — reliable plants demolished, green energy falling short at peak hours, prices spiking, blackouts eventually following — has already played out in Germany, California, Texas, and South Australia. It is not a theory. It is a documented sequence of events that occurs when the demolition of dispatchable power outpaces the maturity of the technology replacing it.

This is the summary. The full article contains the complete sourced timeline, plant-by-plant closure data, PJM auction results, price tables, and every receipt — all in one place.

Read the full article with the receipts  →