Who Owns All Those Gas-Fired Power Plants?
This post goes along with our other post today about a better understanding of on-site power generation (see A Better Understanding of AI Data Centers & On-Site Powergen). Last week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published a post looking at who owns natural gas-fired power plants in the U.S. by type of owner: utility companies, independent power producers (IPP), and commercial/industrial. The post notes that natural gas, with a 43% share, is the number one source of energy used to produce electricity in the U.S. Who owns the means of producing it is important to understand. Read More “Who Owns All Those Gas-Fired Power Plants?”
Do the editors of the Wall Street Journal read Marcellus Drilling News? No, we don’t expect they actually do. Although the editorial published by the editors of the WSJ on Feb. 4 looks like it could have been written by your humble MDN editor—because it says all the things we’ve said for months about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his attempt to blame the PJM Interconnection grid for causing high electricity prices that have, in reality, been caused by Shapiro and his “green” policies. 
Two weeks ago, MDN brought you the news about a mind-blowing announcement from the White House that OpenAI (ChatGPT), SoftBank, and Oracle have pledged to spend $500 billion (with a “b”) to build new data centers to support artificial intelligence (see 
The environmental left is panicked that it may be losing one of its bluest strongholds—the State of Maryland—with the introduction of a new bill by state Democrats (!) that would make it easier to build new natural gas-fired power plants. Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson and House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones, along with other Maryland Democrats, held a presser on Monday in the state capitol of Annapolis. Without revealing the actual language, the pair unveiled a new plan (bill) to reduce energy costs “while furthering the state’s clean energy ambitions” by building more “dispatchable” power. The enviro-left rightly assumes dispatchable means building gas-fired power plants. 
Pennsylvania’s do-nothing Governor, Josh Shapiro, traveled to Pittsburgh yesterday to put on another shuck-and-jive all-sizzle-no-steak show. He was there to unveil what he calls his “Lightning Plan” for energy in the state. His big plan? Reintroduce and try to bully Republicans into accepting a Marcellus-killing carbon tax and onerous regulations on emissions (called PACER, see 
The PJM Interconnection electrical grid operator that covers Pennsylvania (along with all or parts of 12 other states and the District of Columbia) has caved to the political demands of PA Gov. Josh Shapiro to artificially cap the prices of the next capacity auction scheduled for July 2025. It means electric ratepayers won’t see as high of an increase in their electric rates (yah!), but it also means the risk of a blackout has just gone way up (boo!). As we’ve outlined in previous posts, electric prices are soaring in PJM because of the policies of Josh Shapiro. 
Did you happen to catch the news lighting up all the cable news stations yesterday about Chinese startup DeepSeek? The company launched a free AI assistant that it claims uses less data at a fraction of the cost of other AI models. By Monday, the DeepSeek assistant had overtaken U.S. rival ChatGPT in downloads from Apple’s app store. The news sent traders into a tailspin of selling off tech company stocks like Nvidia (which makes the chips used in AI). The news also affected natural gas drillers negatively. Why? 
In December, PA’s Democrat Governor, Josh Shapiro, filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) alleging the PJM electric grid is being mismanaged and using inflated numbers that will cause economic pain for the 65 million customers who buy electricity in the PJM region—in particular the residents of PA. What’s causing the high prices in PJM, a region rich in natural gas? The policies of Shapiro and his predecessor in proposing a carbon tax have scared away new gas-fired power plants from building in the Keystone State. As we reported yesterday, Shapiro has increased his menacing and threats against PJM (see 
Yesterday, with the bitter cold blast (called a polar vortex) hitting the eastern half of the country, the PJM power grid, which covers all or parts of 13 states plus the District of Columbia (including all of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia), experienced its largest single-day power draw EVER. The grid came through with flying colors thanks to natural gas, which provided an average of 42.5% of the total power produced yesterday, and coal, which produced 22.9% of all the power produced yesterday. Add in oil with another 3%, and fossil fuels carried the heavy load by producing 68.4% of PJM’s electricity yesterday. How much did solar and wind produce? An infinitesimally small 4.46% of the electricity produced yesterday. Nuclear produced nearly a quarter of PJM’s electricity yesterday at 24.5%.