The Biggest US Power Grid Is About to Break Up. That’s a Terrible Idea.

You’ve probably noticed your electricity bill creeping up. Or maybe you’ve heard whispers about rolling blackouts. But here’s the part nobody’s talking about: the biggest power grid in America is on the verge of being torn apart. And that’s the last thing we need.

PJM — the regional transmission organization that keeps the lights on for 65 million people from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic — is facing a possible breakup. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is weighing a proposal that would let states pull out of PJM’s wholesale electricity market. It sounds like a technical bureaucratic squabble. It’s not. It’s a fight over who gets to decide whether your home has power in 2030.

A breakup of PJM doesn’t solve the physics of electricity. It just moves the blame from a regional operator to your local politician.

Let’s be clear about what’s driving this. Data centers — the hidden engines of AI and cloud computing — are sucking up electricity at a rate that’s overwhelming the grid. The clean energy transition is adding more demand as we electrify cars and heating. PJM is struggling to approve new generation fast enough. So states like Ohio and West Virginia, tired of seeing their coal plants forced into retirement, are pushing for the right to go it alone. They want to build their own power plants, set their own prices, and tell the feds to buzz off.

I get the frustration. I really do. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: You can’t run a 21st-century AI civilization on a 20th-century grid that’s been chopped into pieces. Electricity doesn’t care about state lines. Power flows where physics takes it. If a data center in Virginia needs juice from a plant in Pennsylvania, a state border is just a line on a map. You can’t legislate against resistance and capacitance.

I spoke to a grid operator who told me, ‘We’re not even close to ready for the load from data centers. Splitting PJM would be like trying to fix a traffic jam by cutting the highway into sections.’ That’s the real problem. The demand from AI and electrification is exploding. The grid is already creaking. And the proposed solution — fragmentation — makes everything worse.

Here’s the twist: the people pushing for a breakup are the same ones who complain about federal overreach. They want local control. But local control of the grid means that a single state’s decision to retire a coal plant could cause blackouts in three other states. It means that every state builds its own generation capacity, duplicating costs and driving up prices for everyone. Neutrality is death in grid policy. Pick a side: either you believe in a unified market with shared reliability, or you accept that your lights will flicker when your neighbor’s politics change.

What happens if PJM breaks up? Rate hikes. The economists who study these markets are unanimous: smaller balkanized markets are less efficient, less resilient, and more expensive. Reliability drops. A patchwork of mini-grids means fewer backup resources to cover emergencies. And the renewable energy buildout slows to a crawl, because solar and wind projects need a large, interconnected market to sell their power. The AI boom that everyone is betting on? It stalls. Data centers need cheap, reliable power 24/7. They won’t get it in a fragmented system.

I’m not saying PJM is perfect. It’s slow, bureaucratic, and has let some coal plants retire too fast. But the answer isn’t to blow it up. The answer is to reform it — faster interconnection, better demand response, and a real plan for the load growth that’s coming. Breaking up the grid is a political stunt that solves a short-term complaint while creating a long-term disaster.

So the next time your lights flicker — and they will, especially if this goes through — don’t blame PJM. Blame the politicians who thought breaking up the grid was a good idea. They’ll be the ones pointing fingers, but the physics of electricity will do the real talking.