Keith Romer

And the first thing she pointed out to us was just how weird of a product electricity is.

You know, power, it's not like shoes or wheat or something where it's easy to store extra inventory in some warehouse somewhere.

Sorry, batteries.

You're just not that good yet.

Right, right.

For the most part, you have to be able to generate electricity in real time for the people who want it right now, which is very tricky.

The idea behind deregulation was that markets could do the planning.

Markets, so efficient.

But markets left completely unchecked could potentially introduce a new problem.

There are a bunch of different ways to solve this problem.

Where Ken and Carol live in Ohio, their electricity is overseen on a regional level by an organization called PJM.

It manages power for 20% of Americans.

And PJM thought that they could fix the problem with this market by creating another market.

And as weird as this sounds, for years and years, the capacity market worked, more or less.

Even on the hottest days, there was pretty much always enough power to go around.

But part of the reason this all worked was electricity use wasn't changing that much.

And so in the capacity market, the price to guarantee that there will be enough power plants making power three years from now, that price has gone way, way up.

But that is not even the worst part.

Okay, Cathy says the high prices in the capacity market may not even be getting companies to build that many new power plants.

for a whole bunch of reasons.