Kathy Kunkel

I cannot imagine someone designing this system on purpose.

Seriously, it has sort of evolved.

And as problems have come up, it's been kind of taped together to keep working.

But yeah, I don't think this is really what anyone would just sit down and dream up.

Power demand or our use of electricity is not constant throughout the day or throughout the year.

In particular, it spikes typically at certain times.

There will be rolling blackouts.

I actually happen to be in Puerto Rico right now where that's actually a relatively frequent occurrence that there's not sufficient power plant capacity to supply the peak demand.

And yeah, that's exactly what happens.

The utility has to

curtail the demand.

Which was designed to incentivize new capacity to come online to make sure that PJM will be able to keep meeting that peak demand in the future.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's trying to look out in the future and say, how much power are we going to need?

If we don't have it right now, can we provide a price signal so that a generation developer thinks, oh, there's money here, let me build my power plant in PJM.

Up until now-ish, like for the past couple of decades, the U.S.

electricity sector as a whole has been operating in essentially a flat demand environment.

Electricity demand just wasn't growing that much.

The capacity market is becoming a lot tighter.

You know, the demand is there and the supply is maybe not high.