The Political Complexity of Regional Electricity Policy Formation

Table 3

Summary of PJM Stakeholder Perceptions.

Perception in the PJM Stakeholder Process	Illustrative Stakeholder Quote
Growth in the number of stakeholders, and increasing conflicts in commercial interests among stakeholders, are creating challenges in moving rule changes forward.	You needed significantly smaller rooms to have the meetings. The intensity of disagreements was just as great as today. There were things they never reached agreement on but there was definitely more of a spirit of, ‘We’re all in this together and we need to make it work,’ than there is today” (PJM-01).
The stakeholder process has become factionalized into consumer-side interests and supply-side interests. (Note that “load” is electricity-industry parlance for consumers.)	“The problem that some people find is that one side can stymy the other. You have generation, transmission, load, and so on. Generation’s always worried that load can stop them from doing things. Load is worried about generation.” (PJM-02).
Perceptions that consumer-side interests have more political power.	“There is a lot of leverage on the load side.” (PJM-03); What you actually find now is the load interest, where it used to be they had about 50 percent of the vote, they now have 65 percent of the vote.” (PJM-04.)
Perceptions that supplier-side interests have more political power.	“[The stakeholder process is] tilted towards the supplier side” (PJM-05); “There have certainly been complaints by load that…PJM pushed through a whole bunch of changes through the capacity market without really knowing how they were going to interact with each other.” (PJM-03)