Your electric bill is two different problems taped together.
One is energy and capacity — can the region make enough power when everyone hits the AC. That is the PJM side. In 2024 the capacity auction — the price of “be there on the peak day” — went from about $29 to about $270. New Jersey’s share was around $1.3 billion. That is why the supply line jumped 17 to 22 percent in June 2025.
The other is delivery plus riders — poles, storms, and every social program hung on the kilowatt-hour. Green credits. Carbon-permit costs. Utility extras for belonging to the regional grid. Rooftop-solar cost shifts. That is why the all-in home rate sits around 23 to 25 cents even when statewide use is flat.
Those are not the same failure. Politicians talk about them as if they were.
Capacity got expensive because firm plants left and new ones did not show up on time. Coal at Mercer and Hudson came off. Gas and nuclear still carry the peak. New generation sat in the interconnection queue. Offshore-wind contracts were signed above market, then slipped or died. Resource adequacy does not care about a groundbreaking. If the megawatts are not in the model, the auction price goes vertical.
On top of that, the state kept buying attributes instead of energy. Renewable credits. Carbon allowances that make in-state gas bid higher. Master-plan dates that treat retirement as a virtue before the replacement exists. That does not show up as “NERC violation.” It shows up as a fatter bill and a tighter reserve margin.
Murphy built most of that stack and then mailed “relief” from the Clean Energy Fund and the carbon-permit pot. That is not a lower cost to serve. That is moving money between accounts.
Republicans were right that a lot of those wind contracts were a bad buy. They were wrong if the only verb was “stop.” Stopping a project does not put a combined-cycle or a nuclear unit in the queue. Ciattarelli blamed a generation of Democratic control. The franchise on the poles, and the habit of hiding policy on the tariff, survived both parties.
Sherrill won on the June shock. She froze what a governor can freeze, which is mostly the political temperature, not PJM. A freeze delays recognition. JCP&L already filed for more delivery and storm money, pushed toward 2028. A $25 credit times 3.6 million homes is about $90 million. The capacity hit was in the billions.
Two moves of hers actually go to keeping the lights on. She cut the paper wall that blocked new nuclear. Salem and Hope Creek already make about 40 percent of in-state generation; pretending the next unit was illegal was not an engineering position. And she told DEP to move faster on gas uprates. That is how you get megawatts this decade.
The rest is still planning. State-procured nuclear with a special credit after commercial operation is an offtake, not a market. Rate Counsel already flagged, on an earlier draft, that socializing that risk can hit the monthly bill before the first extra MWh. Putting data centers in their own class is cost causation if they pay the substations they trigger. It is theater if last year’s spike is blamed on load that did not show up in statewide sales.
Reliability people already know the punchline. You do not fix a reserve-margin problem with a press release. You add resources that can be dispatched, you interconnect them, or you pay the auction.
The Final Say
When power is short, you build. New Jersey held hearings and argued about a turbine that never landed.
A 20 percent supply shock is real in a high-cost state. A freeze and a coupon are not a stack. Murphy scheduled physics. Republicans vetoed projects and left the queue full. The grid reads committed capacity, not platforms.
Until the bill stops being a second tax and a climate newsletter, the honest options are still use less, leave, or let people build what the auction is pricing in. The meter is the only part of this system still doing its job.
References
https://rpa.org/news/lab/whats-happening-with-electricity-rates-in-new-jersey
https://pub.njleg.state.nj.us/publications/budget/governors-budget/2026/bpu_response_2026.pdf
https://nj.gov/bpu/pdf/reports/AN_INVESTIGATION_OF_PJMs_CAPACITY_MARKET_FINAL_8.12.26.pdf
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/regulation/new-jerseys-electricity-problem-isnt-data-centers-its-bad-policy/
https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260707a.shtml
https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260713a.shtml
https://www.roi-nj.com/2026/04/09/industry/energy-utilities/sherrill-signs-bill-lifting-de-facto-nuclear-power-moratorium-launches-task-force-at-salem-nuclear-power-plant/
https://www.nj.gov/rpa/docs/NJDRC%20Remarks%20on%20S4876_12-1-25.pdf
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/jersey-utility-seeks-rate-hike-210700520.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/business/new-jersey-electricity-prices-governor-election.html