Interior Secretary Doug Burgum addressed the ongoing issues in the PJM electricity market, referencing a joint statement from 13 state governors urging the PJM Board to prioritize affordability and reliable power for the region's 65 million residents.

Washington

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum addressed the ongoing issues in the PJM electricity market, referencing a joint statement from 13 state governors urging the PJM Board to prioritize affordability and reliable power for the region's 65 million residents. Burgum indicated that PJM's options are limited and expects the auction to proceed, warning that states may consider withdrawing if concerns are not addressed.

Burgum attributed recent grid reliability and price challenges to previous climate policies that reduced baseload power and increased reliance on intermittent renewables. He argued that this shift has led to higher electricity prices and lower reliability, particularly in regions with aggressive renewable adoption, and emphasized the need for policies grounded in economics and reliability.

Sec. Burgum: PJM will hold the auction and their options are limited

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum may have the answer to those and more questions and joins us now. Mr. Secretary, it's been a busy week for you. Thank you for coming back on twice in a week. It's our honor. Appreciate you being here. We have a statement from PJM. It's kind of a word salad. Doesn't really say much. Have you talked to them? Have they agreed that they would they would hold this auction? Well, first of all, Brian, I want to say again, this is a thanks to President Trump's leadership on the topic of affordability. We're even having this conversation because today we did announce at the White House, 13 state governors spanning that area that covers the PJM market area. You described 13 governors, eight Democrats, five Republicans signed together a statement of principles being delivered to the PJM Board of Governors saying, here's a set of principles we would like you to follow to achieve both of these goals. And number one, affordability for the 65 million people that live in that grid area. And number two, make sure they have the power to run the manufacturing, the AI factories that are being built and the cities and the communities that are growing in that region. So we've got a we can do both. Other parts of the country are doing both. This is an area, as you said, PJM in December, unprecedented, had a failed auction in December. FERC has asked them for a response, that response coming soon. This is 13 state leaders who feel they've been cut out of the process, saying here are the principles led by the White House, led by President Trump's concern about affordability. Again, so unprecedented problem, unprecedented leadership by President Trump. Yeah, but again, PJM is going to kind of do what it wants. I mean, it can listen to these recommendations or not. Again, they sent us a statement. The first line is PJM is reviewing the principles set forth by the White House and governors. Then it has a bunch of stuff about we're going to take a look at it. So do you think PJM will hold the auction? I think PJM will hold the auction. I think their options, their options at this point are quite limited because we heard this morning from governors, states may decide, hey, we are going to pull out. I mean, Texas runs its own grid. They're not participating. This could be a collapse of PJM if they're not willing to put in together, shed the bureaucratic principles that led us to this spot. This was driven by the ideology of the previous administration under the Biden administration, the climate extremists, as you said in your lead in, shutting down baseload power, 17 gigawatts of power shut down under the Biden administration's baseload power. And then replacing it with very expensive taxpayer subsidized intermittent forms of electricity. And you've got less reliability at higher prices. So consumers lose, businesses lose. This is a—President Trump inherited a giant mess in terms of our electrical grid. He's been turning it around. This is an area of the country that's had some of the highest price increases in the country. We have other places in the country that didn't go wholeheartedly into the climate extremism agenda. And that's why you see places in this country, including my home state of North Dakota, electricity places are one third of what they are in North Dakota as they are in New England. So ideology drives politics. Politics drives policies. And the policies were bad for reliability, bad for America, certainly bad for consumers on affordability in the states that went all in to the green new scam thinking versus common sense policy driven by physics and driven by economics. President Trump—President Trump's bringing us back to that. It's Kelly here. I hope you don't mind if I jump in, Secretary. It's good to see you again. And, you know, I'm talking with Brian before the show because I understand that bills are going up. And we've talked on this program about whether to just write households checks. I don't know who funds that, big tech or you name it. It wouldn't actually be that expensive to give people $100 or even $1,000 a year. But that's not going to solve the issue of blackouts, right? It's one thing if I can do a little bit more to pay those escalating bills. But if I'm not going to have power, which is one of the risks here, that's a big problem. So from that point of view, I ask, do we need the wind farms? Do we just need whatever power source can quickly come online here? Because no one wants power outages. Well, no one wants power outages, but the intermittent sources of wind and solar are part of the problem on the reliability. That combined with shutting down the base load. But when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, that's often not the time when we are at risk. When the sun goes down, there's zero solar right now in the system in PJM. And wind, as we know, even you're reporting, I'm sure, on companies in Europe that are in this business that are saying, we missed our quarterly earnings because it wasn't as windy as we thought it was going to be. And so these are not reliable sources of power in the face of increasing power demand from consumers, from businesses, and from the reindustrialization of the U.S., whether it's advanced manufacturing or manufacturing of intelligence itself in an AI factory. So it's been part of the problem, the over-rotation to the renewables and the shutting down of the base load was creating the higher prices. When we have these shortages in the areas that have adopted the most intermittent, the most, quote, renewable, which is not really renewable because it's what it's made of, but the most renewable, whether it's the U.K., whether it's Germany, or whether it's New England states, or whether it's California, these are the places today that they adopted the most. They've got the highest prices for electricity, and they've got the lowest reliability, the highest risk for blackout. So it's part of the problem. It's not the solution.

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