Exelon wants states to let utilities own power plants again, pointing to a $329.17 per megawatt-day capacity price for 2026/2027, the highest regulators allow. That’s an 833% jump from the year before, according to New Jersey’s utility regulator.
If you get a bill from BGE, you’re already feeling it. The delivery rate alone is up 30% since 2020, and Exelon CEO Calvin Butler wants state lawmakers to let his company build new power plants of its own to bring supply costs down.
The supply side is what’s pushing bills up
Butler says about 80% of recent bill increases in Exelon’s territory came from power supply costs. Delivery charges, the part a utility controls directly, climbed too, though by less. BGE’s distribution rate is up 30% since 2020 and has run at about twice the rate of inflation since 2010, according to Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel.
Regulators are also letting utilities earn more on that delivery business. Pepco’s October 2025 Maryland rate filing requested a 10.50% return on equity, the regulated profit a utility earns on its wires investment. For a Pepco customer, that 10.50% return is money built into your delivery bill before the company builds a single power plant. Butler argues that same guaranteed, regulated return is what makes utility-built power plants cheap to finance compared with a merchant generator borrowing at market rates.
Data centers and new demand are straining the system
The supply side is under pressure because demand is climbing. The Energy Information Administration expects US electricity use to keep rising through 2027, the strongest four-year growth stretch since 2000. Data centers are the biggest reason EIA cites. They used 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, or 4.4% of all US electricity, and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projects that share could reach 12% by 2028.
In 2025, PJM’s own summer forecast put peak demand at over 154,000 megawatts, against roughly 179,200 megawatts of available capacity. For the first time in PJM’s own assessment, supply could fall short of reserves in an extreme scenario reaching an all-time peak above 166,000 megawatts. If PJM hits that 166,000-megawatt scenario, the reserve margin that’s supposed to keep your lights on during a heat wave gets thin.
PJM answered with a one-time Reliability Resource Initiative that added more than 9,300 megawatts of new capacity to a grid already under strain, most of it online by 2030.
What PJM’s capacity auctions show
PJM’s annual capacity auction pays power plant owners years ahead of time to promise they’ll be available, and every plant in a pricing zone gets paid the same cleared price no matter what it bid. That price cleared at $269.92 per megawatt-day for the 2025/2026 delivery year across most of the footprint, then jumped to $329.17 for 2026/2027, which PJM itself calls the FERC-approved price cap.
The two auctions since then eased. They cleared at $333.44 for 2027/2028 and, most recently, $325.00 for 2028/2029, with every zone landing at that same price and none of them short enough to need a higher local rate.
New Jersey called the run-up to that first spike an 833% increase and set a $325 price ceiling and $175 floor on future auctions. It also funded a $430 million relief package that sent $100 to every one of its 3.9 million residential customers, so if you’re one of them, that check already landed. That’s a state government spending money to soften a price its own capacity market produced, part of why utilities are pointing at the market’s design itself.
The case for letting utilities build again
Exelon hasn’t owned a power plant since it spun off Constellation Energy on February 2, 2022, and Maryland’s wires-only rule for utilities traces to a 1999 restructuring law that let the state’s utilities sell off their generating stations. That split is why BGE and Pepco own the poles, substations and transmission lines that carry power to a house, but nothing that generates it, and it’s the rule Butler wants changed.
Butler’s case rests on financing. He says Exelon’s return on assets runs about 9.5%, roughly half what he says independent power plant owners earn, and argues a regulated utility can borrow more cheaply and build faster because it already owns land and interconnection rights near its wires.
If regulators say yes, the profit behind that 9.5% return comes out of the same bill you pay every month. “We have inadequate supply to meet this rising demand, and until we address that issue, all of our bills are going to continue to go up,” Butler said in April 2026.
Butler frames the scale as historic. He said in December 2025 that the industry hasn’t seen load growth “of this magnitude” in “probably the last four decades,” and utilities nationwide plan to spend $1.1 trillion on infrastructure over the next five years to keep pace. Exelon’s own results give him room to make the case. The company’s net income reached $2.8 billion in 2025, up from $2.5 billion in 2024.
The case against it
Consumer advocates read the same numbers differently. John Howat of the National Consumer Law Center says growth like this makes utilities see “dollar signs,” and that isn’t the same as the public interest. Maryland’s People’s Counsel, David Lapp, says utility ownership lets a company “grow their profits by expanding their businesses into generation so they can shift risks on the ratepayers.” New Jersey’s rate counsel, Brian Lipman, makes the same point about shifting risk from developers onto the people paying the bill.
If regulators do shift that risk onto ratepayers, it lands on the same delivery line that’s already up 30% since 2020 on a BGE bill.
Independent power producers reject Butler’s premise outright. LS Power’s Marji Philips said independent companies “were investing heavily in new plants,” disputing that the market is failing. The Electric Power Supply Association’s Todd Snitchler has warned lawmakers against “a reversal in policy and a return to the monopoly utility approach for generation,” and Advanced Energy United’s Amisha Rai argues the fix is more market competition.
Maryland chose a rebate over an ownership answer
State Sen. Kevin Harris tested the idea directly, introducing a bill in February 2026 that would have directed Maryland regulators to require at least one utility to build new generation, limited to storage, wind, solar, biofuels and hydropower. Senate President Bill Ferguson said lawmakers had “a level of skepticism” about whether it would save ratepayers money.
That bill didn’t pass. Maryland’s legislature instead passed a rate relief measure expected to cut residential bills by at least $150 a year, without authorizing any utility to own a power plant. If you’re a BGE or Pepco customer, that’s the concrete result so far: $150 a year off your bill, and no new power plant.
The ownership question itself is still unanswered. Butler has said he means to keep pressing lawmakers on it beyond Maryland, and PJM’s capacity auctions clearing above $325 a megawatt-day are the reason other state legislatures keep getting asked to take up the same fight.
