Are renewables killing it? Quite possibly — literally.

I have in my possession a couple of copies of PJM’s book from 2017 celebrating its 90th anniversary, which places its humble beginnings in 1927 when three regional utilities realized they had differing daily peak-power demands that could allow them to split the costs of generation facilities and interconnecting transmission lines and still serving all of their various customers while minimizing the time the generators weren’t being used.

All beneficial for everybody, and so the first power pool — known as PNJ at the time — was formed.

94 years later, PJM now boasts a footprint that stretches into 13 states and the District of Columbia, manages the electricity flow for 65 million people across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest, oversees more than 180 GWs of generation, and manages something on the order of $40 billion in billing each year.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator has also enjoyed similar halcyon days (if you overlook some poaching and border disputes with other grid operators) since it formed nearly 20 years ago, now stretching fully down the center of the country from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

And they both may be at the peak of their success.

As the current worldwide obsession with environmental politics and related virtue-signaling continues to spur ever-growing demand for emissions-free and renewable energy, highlighting the work of RTO/ISOs and influencing their goings-on are where it’s at for the hippest of hand-waving academics, holier-than-thou activists of various stripes and media members who identify as hifalutin “journalists” with personal opinions that matter rather than humble news-reporters (apparently the allure of life as an “ink-stained wretch” has lost favor in the Digital Age).

Part of their interest is in top-down promulgation of their preferences by shoehorning all states into FERC-jurisdictional RTO/ISO structures and then leveraging the current left-leaning FERC to force desired changes (often enough at the objection of state-level officials and regulators). That’s the strategy activists fear they’ve lost since the non-FERC-jurisdictional Southeast Energy Exchange Market was approved by operation of law in October when a deadlocked FERC was unable to make a determination one way or the other.

And it’s just that increased scrutiny and pressure from the “cool” classes that might be regional grid-operators’ eventual undoing.

How and why, you ask? Well, as Yeats so eloquently acquiesced, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” If we’ve learned little else from the long, complicated history of cooperative federalism, it’s that states don’t like to be told what to do.

Among PJM’s 13 states are several aggressively pursuing environmental goals related to energy production: Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative members New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia for sure, and while not RGGI members, North Carolina remains a hotbed for solar development and Illinois just passed the Clean Energy Jobs Act to phase out fossil-fuel generation over the next 25 years.

Some of those states have grumbled about PJM's unwillingness to move as quickly as they prefer. More than three years ago now, I reported on New Jersey Board of Public Utilities President Joe Fiordaliso's threat to leave PJM. In a subsequent visit earlier this year to the GT Power Hour podcast I host, he backed away from the brinkmanship only slightly.

Other PJM member-states are happy with the status quo, and still others are aggressively opposing being saddled with the additional unspoken green that comes with “green” energy — that green being the money it costs to build it all. For example, one Kentucky-based power cooperative made it clear (Slide 5) in a recent PJM workshop on revising its generation-interconnection policy in light of the changing industry that, “state policies differ across the region (and between regions/RTOs); costs should not be imposed on states not sharing the policy objectives.” Depending on your perspective, it may not seem coincidental that those oppositional states like Kentucky and West Virginia also have longstanding and ongoing co-dependencies with various fossil fuels.

Given PJM’s founding ideal of sharing costs for mutual benefit, how can that model be sustained when there’s plenty of costs to go around but disagreement on what’s beneficial?

Equally, les bons temps may soon no longer be rolling in MISO, quite literally. Louisiana, it turns out, is hesitant to pay for the transmission lines to connect the explosion of wind turbines in the upper Midwest to MISO’s system, even though MISO assured the state it won’t. And why would they when the expert they tasked with looking into it couldn’t guarantee who would benefit or when? (It might also again be relevant that the Bayou State has a thriving oil and gas industry.) According to published reports, the motion regarding a notice to withdraw from MISO is up for consideration at the Louisiana Public Service Commission’s next regular meeting on Dec. 14, though the commission’s chairman appears strongly opposed to the idea.

This after orders out of the up-until-recently split FERC — such as the renewable-friendly/thermal-antagonistic revisions to PJM’s capacity-offer rules (MOPR and MSOC, for the arcane-acronym-lovers out there) — have further pushed the envelope on integrating renewables.

Interestingly, FERC recently demurred in a case involving utilities within the Tennessee Valley Authority region seeking to force an unwilling TVA to allow open-access use of its transmission lines to buy cheaper power elsewhere, shrugging that TVA isn’t within FERC’s jurisdiction though arguing it’s time that it should be.

So where does this undercurrent of "you're not the boss of me" bristling go, mirroring in many ways as it does the nationwide identity-politics war? As always, “follow the money” is surely valid advice. PJM and MISO never miss opportunities to note their value-add provides billions of dollars in benefits and savings each year. If or when those savings are eventually offset for individual states remains to be seen, but it’s sure to hinge at least in part on how much they’re asked to pay for other states’ more-aggressive actions.