The Price of Denial: Ohio’s Grid Marches Toward Collapse as Ideology Trumps Engineering

By Miranda Morrow | Senior Correspondent, eGeneration News

Ohioans, brace yourselves: your electricity bills are going up — again. Not because of greed. Not because of profit. But because the architects of our energy future have chosen fantasy over function and aesthetic theory over technological merit.

In PJM’s latest capacity auction — the mechanism allegedly designed to ensure there is enough energy to meet demand — prices have surged past all expectations, hitting a capped ceiling imposed only after the last auction saw an 830% price spike. This time, capacity cleared at $329.17 per megawatt per day, or over $120,000 annually for each megawatt of promised power. That is not payment for electricity itself. It is the reservation fee — the cost of knowing the electricity might be there when it’s needed. And still, consumers are told to prepare for another 1.5% to 5% price increase next year.

The cause? It is not a mystery. It is not even complex. It is a consequence of refusing to build what works, and instead betting the grid’s survival on the unreliable dreams of wind and solar developers, many of whom now sit idle in a “queue” — their projects unable to proceed because the very system that encouraged them cannot now absorb them.

An Auction of Excuses

The grid operator, PJM Interconnection, oversees the flow of electricity for 13 states, including Ohio. Its auction system is a well-meaning contrivance, designed to ensure supply matches peak demand. But today it exists in name only. As Jon Gordon of Advanced Energy United explained, “It’s pretty hard to bring new generation resources online when the process for doing so is closed for new generation.” Closed. Full. Backlogged. Trapped in its own contradictions.

There are over 46,000 megawatts of projects PJM has already approved — most of them wind and solar — waiting to materialize. They are RIGHTLY stopped cold locally by permitting hurdles, materials shortages, and the inescapable reality that solar panels don’t work in the dark and turbines don’t turn in the calm. These are not “capacity resources.” These are theater props in a morality play, funded by your taxes, championed by lobbyists, and forced onto a grid built for steel, not sandcastles.

Meanwhile, 63,000 more megawatts of projects are lined up behind them, hoping for a future that will never come unless someone first builds the steel, wire, and turbine factories that the environmentalists have spent decades opposing. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

And here we are in Ohio. Electricity demand is rising — driven by data centers, electrification mandates, and economic expansion — while supply is shackled. Not by physics. By insidious policies that do not recognize the realities of the grid.

Reliability Is Not a Luxury

“This is a very tight market,” explained Abe Silverman, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins. He is being generous. It is not just tight. It is suicidal.

The architects of this system have allowed political ideology to override engineering fundamentals. The result is a market where we pay more, and receive less, because the power we’re promised isn’t always available when we need it. It's like booking a hotel room and being told, “we’ll build it if the wind’s blowing.” And when it doesn’t blow, we are told to conserve. To dim the lights. To shut down our industries. To accept less.

This is not civilization. This is planned scarcity masquerading as virtue.

A Failure of Priorities

State and federal policies have been so focused on achieving renewable futility that it has kneecapped reliable generation. Utilities are bullied into retiring coal plants, while gas plants — which at least burn when asked — are treated as guilty holdovers. Nuclear, the only carbon-free technology that actually works, is only somewhat tacitly tolerated but not embraced. Instead, we are told to “diversify” — to embrace an “all of the above” strategy as if wisdom is found in random assortment.

But we do not need a buffet of dysfunction. We need a spine of stability. We need generation that is dispatchable, dense, and durable. Instead, we are building a grid dependent upon the unpredictability of the weather, expensive low-power-density batteries, the most inefficient natural gas peaker plants that produce twice the carbon of baseload plants, foreign supply chains to deliver rare earth elements that are byproducts of coal mining to build wind turbines and solar panels, and taxpayer patience.

Monopolists in Green Clothing

As Ohio’s capacity costs soar, record profits are being made — not by enterprising innovators, but by utilities and transmission monopolies who thrive in the absence of competition. This is not the free market. This is a state-sponsored cartel, wrapped in recycled packaging and sold as sustainability and competition.

Even the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a rare moment of clarity, noted that part of the cost increases stem from PJM better accounting for the unreliability of gas-fired plants. But gas is not the problem — the war on gas is. During cold weather, gas pipelines freeze, not because gas is inadequate, but because infrastructure is being choked by policies that prohibit investment in redundancy. Coal plants that could have bridged the gap are shuttered prematurely. Nuclear plants are stalled by regulatory molasses (which thanks to President Trump's executive orders may be a thing of the past). The only things advancing with speed are mandates for wind, solar, and the misguided green utopia that never arrives.

The Real Solution: Build What Works

Yes, we must build. But build intelligently. Build capacity that can be counted on, not prayed for. And until we do, we must protect the base-load backbone that still exists. This includes coal-fired power plants like the OVEC units in Ohio, originally built to power uranium enrichment — an act of national defense, not corporate greed.

Those plants still offer resilient, on-demand power. Replacing them with natural gas is a gamble; replacing them with wind is a joke. We do not retire the old guard before the new guard has proven itself. That is not progress. That is suicide.

The Moral of the Story

To the legislators of Ohio and the United States: if you believe in markets, then let real competition work. Stop favoring wind and solar through mandates, subsidies, and regulatory favoritism. Level the field and let nuclear, gas, and carbon-capture compete on real merit. Set the goal — reliability, affordability, low emissions — and let the best ideas win. Do not define success by the virtue signals of press releases, but by the cold clarity of kilowatt-hours delivered.

There is no justice in forced scarcity. There is no morality in unaffordable energy. There is only civilization or its absence. Choose.

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Miranda Morrow is Senior Correspondent for eGeneration News, reporting on energy policy, markets, and technology from a free-market perspective.