DAVID BLACKMON: Competition, Not Monopoly Control, The Answer To Grid Reliability

America’s electricity debate is drifting toward a dangerous simplification: that if prices rise or investment lags, the culprit must be “the market,” and the cure must be a return to monopoly-style control. Big public utilities want back in the generation game in this new world of AI-fueled load growth, but theirs is a lumbering model that can’t move fast enough to meet the need.

Calvin Butler, CEO of the Exelon empire of utility companies, alleged recently that Independent Power Producers (IPPs) are guilty of intentionally under-investing in new projects so as to “capitalize off the market scarcity.” It’s a big allegation with little real evidence to support it. This utility’s attempt to brand IPPs as enabling “cartel behavior” collapses under the most basic scrutiny. A cartel requires coordinated output restriction or price-setting among suppliers, sustained by the ability to punish defectors and exclude entrants.

The market structure in deregulated markets like PJM, ERCOT, and others are the polar opposite. IPPs like Vistra, Calpine, NRG, and Constellation are not some monolith – they are in fact fierce competitors. They bid into energy, capacity, and ancillary service markets that explicitly pit one generator against another in real time. Prices are set through market-clearing mechanisms overseen by regulators, market monitors, and a dense web of compliance rules. PJM’s capacity market is intentionally designed as a three-year-forward procurement mechanism, whose goal is to ensure resources are available to meet forecasted demand and to create longer-term price signals for investment.

If this is a cartel, it is the ricketiest one ever devised—one in which participants are compelled to undercut one another daily in order to survive.

PJM, for all its imperfections, remains one of the clearest examples that competitive power markets can procure reliability services transparently, attract capital when rules are stable, and police bad behavior through oversight rather than political muscle. The notion that its shortcomings justify discarding a competitive framework in favor of a more centralized or monopolistic approach is misguided. In fact, history tells us the opposite.