* Yesterday, the Tribune Editorial Board published “An electricity crisis is looming for Illinois. Is anybody paying attention in Springfield?”…

In 2021, Illinois enacted a comprehensive clean energy law mandating the closure of all coal- and natural gas-fired power plants by 2045. As part of the Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, one of Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature legislative accomplishments, a large number of gas-fired facilities were to be shuttered by 2030.

At the time, there were warnings from industry and others that the intermediate 2030 mandate would jeopardize electricity reliability in the state. With Illinois then producing more power than it consumed, Pritzker and the many environmental groups that backed the law said such predictions were alarmist and off-base.

Just three years later, it appears the alarmists were right, and Pritzker and the green lobby were wrong.

Payments to power generators in return for their promise to produce to their capacity when demand is highest — as established via an auction overseen by PJM Interconnection, the grid manager for a large swath of the U.S. from northern Illinois to the mid-Atlantic — are set to soar more than 800% and will raise all our electric bills beginning next June.[…]

Power-hungry data centers, the development of which a number of Chicago aldermen are encouraging within city limits as a way to generate more property tax revenue, are on the drawing boards. ComEd projects that new data centers throughout its territory easily could require four gigawatts of electricity. To put that in context, such an enormous amount alone would consume nearly the entire output of two of the five nuclear stations serving the region. […]

It’s becoming clearer all the time that the 2030 deadlines are unrealistic and need to be made more flexible. Backsliding on the law’s gas plant-closure mandates is anathema to environmental groups, who surely would fight hard against such an effort and likely would criticize any Democratic “friends” who consider such a thing. But gas-fired “peaker” plants, which can rapidly fire up and just as rapidly turn off, for many years have been the most critical resources to keep the lights on when the temperatures soar (or plummet). They remain critical.

* Governor Pritzker participated in a panel discussion about climate change and technology yesterday and said that the editorial got some things wrong. During the ensuing press conference, I asked the governor what the Tribune editorial got wrong…

Isabel: Governor, you mentioned that the Tribune editorial got some things wrong. What were those things?

Governor Pritzker: I mean, my point is that there’s a broad topic that was raised, but only specific solutions that were proposed in it. And so that’s all, I think there were things missing from the presentation of that editorial. The broad topic is we need more electricity production in the state period, end of sentence. And as I said just a few minutes ago, I agree, and we should be going after that, and we are. There’s never a moment that we’re not talking about electricity production as well as climate action in the context of that in the state of Illinois.

* Some more background from the governor’s office…

In July, we saw historically high prices coming out of the electric capacity market for all states in PJM – including Northern Illinois.

But it is important to recognize that these capacity prices, and the broader problems facing our grid, are not caused by CEJA. These are national issues, and there are a lot of factors at play.

A lot has changed since the passage of CEJA.

· When developing CEJA, policymakers drew on respected, industry projections for electricity demand, used by transmission planners to manage our national grid.

· These projections have risen dramatically over the past two years, for everyone.

· When CEJA was passed, energy efficiency improvements were leading to reductions in demand, but the rapid growth of data centers, in particular, has reversed that trend. Not just for Illinois – many states, from Texas to California to Virginia, are all seeing rapid increases in demand.

· While these changes were not the expected outcome, we are not unprepared either. CEJA includes the 2025 ICC study on resource adequacy that this article references, so we have a way of responding to exactly these kind of changes.

· In fact, CEJA has played a role in addressing these problems.

· The Carbon Mitigation Credits that kept our nuclear plants open (a major source of capacity, themselves) also offset roughly 1/3 of the impact of these capacity prices for our consumers. That is, without CEJA, the bill impact experienced by consumers would be 50% higher than it is now.

The results of these auctions also go beyond “simple supply and demand.” The outcomes are based on regional transmission organization rules that are neither designed for, nor work for Illinois.

· For one, PJM recently downrated “capacity factors” for many kinds of generation, arguing that these facilities cannot provide as much capacity as PJM previously thought. This increases the amount of capacity needed, driving up prices even without any changes in actual generation facilities.

Additionally, there is currently more capacity waiting in the queue, for approval to connect to the grid, than there is serving the State of Illinois today, and the wait time for this queue is longer than ever. Reforms are dearly needed to enable new electricity generation and storage, much of it supported by state policy, to actually get connected and start serving Illinois customers.

Governor Pritzker has joined PJM Governors in calling for improvements to the current system, to reduce queue wait times and to adopt auction rules that better reflect the actual capacity resources of our state. We continue to engage with both regional transmission organizations, other states, and federal stakeholders to push for these changes.

This is a challenge, but we can overcome it without pushing back the closure of plants actively polluting in EJ communities.

· The same tight market that led to such a big spike in prices also means that even small changes can lead to larger drops in prices than we generally expect. Change is needed – but it will have a big impact.

· In terms of timing, the 2030 gas peaker plant closures are limited to inefficient, costly plants located in environmental justice communities. We should not accept that the only way to have abundant electricity is by sacrificing the health of already-overburdened communities. This is a manageable set of plants to replace in the time we have.

· In addition to exacerbating the burden on EJ communities, rolling back our climate actions contributes to increasing the chance and intensity of the same extreme heat waves that create our high electric capacity needs.

· We are actively working with stakeholders on potential solutions to this time-sensitive challenge. That includes not just the battery storage industry, but also our partners in the legislature, organized labor, and a wide range of industry and nonprofit stakeholders.

Thoughts?