Governor Shapiro has been the most aggressive governor in the PJM footprint on electricity cost issues, but nearly all of that work has been aimed at wholesale market structure rather than near-term retail bill relief.
The price collar. In December 2024, Shapiro sued PJM over its capacity auction design. That fight helped produce a settlement establishing a price cap on the auction, later approved by FERC and then extended further into future delivery years. Those measures likely prevented even larger price spikes, but they represent avoided increases, not reductions from prior consumer bills. The Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported on the extension of that price cap framework.
Cost causation for data centers. A January 2026 statement of principles signed by Shapiro, other governors, and federal officials called for assigning the cost of new long-term capacity contracts to large new loads such as data centers rather than broadly socializing those costs across households and small businesses. If adopted, that would help limit future increases. It would not lower the current baseline. The document is available from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Load forecast accountability. New Pennsylvania law also gives the PUC authority to review and validate utility load forecasts submitted to PJM. That matters because utilities have a financial incentive to attract large loads like data centers into their territories, which grows their rate base. That creates a risk that utilities overstate feasible demand growth in their forecasts, or count projects that are shopping for interconnection across multiple utility territories as incremental load in each one. Inflated load forecasts feed directly into PJM's capacity demand curve, which in turn drives higher auction clearing prices. The Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania has a useful writeup on the ratepayer rationale behind that law.
These are meaningful actions aimed at protecting consumers from future rate increases, though unlikely to lower bills in the near term.
