Brian Lehrer Weekend: NJ Utilities; Supermarket Work; World Cup Quiz

**Brian Lehrer** (0:00)
Hi, Brian Lehrer here. Up next, Brian Lehrer Weekend. Three of our favorite segments from the week packaged together for you to listen to on the weekend. So enjoy, and I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10 a.m. on WNYC and wnyc.org.
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin in New Jersey, where Governor Mikey Sherrill has been pushing to bring down some of the highest electric bills in the country. You remember it was her core campaign promise, and she made some fresh news on that last week. In her first six months, Governor Sherrill has signed a flurry of energy laws, and they include this July 7th trio of bills aimed at utilities and data centers, paired with one-time bill credits. And just this week, the governor signed a nuclear procurement bill meant to add power supply over the long haul. Yes, the Democratic governor wants to give another look to nuclear power. The through line is affordability, of course, though it's believed the real payoff is mostly years away. That said, in the very near short term, every electric customer will receive a one-time $25 credit on their August bill.
Michael Solwaran covers New Jersey Energy and the Environment for WNYC and Gothamist, where he's been tracking all of this. Hey, Michael, welcome back to the show.

**Michael Saul Warren** (1:39)
Hey, Brian, thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:41)
So let's tick through those three bills. One of them makes New Jersey utilities join a regional grid organization. What does that mean?

**Michael Saul Warren** (1:49)
Yeah, the regional grid organization, it is the power grid. So in New York, that's the ISO. But in New Jersey, that is PJM, which is a large regional grid, serves about more than a dozen states, including all of New Jersey. So all of the four major electric utilities serving the Garden State are already members of PJM. But up until now, that membership was technically voluntary. This law is going to make it mandatory.
And that has some financial implications, both for customers, but also for the utility companies.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:30)
But if I'm understanding you correctly, it just reinforces a status quo. Whatever benefits being a member of that regional grid confers were already in place?

**Michael Saul Warren** (2:42)
Yes. The main thing that's going to change here under the law is that the incentive that utilities were being paid to be members is going to go away.
Because now it's mandatory, so membership doesn't have to be incentivized. So what that means for customers is that a fee that had been on their bill that was basically a little cut to the utilities for being members of this regional grid isn't going to be on the bill anymore.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:14)
All right. Next bill, the data center bill. It's one the business community fought. It's probably the one of the three they fought the hardest. Tell me if you think that's right.
What does it actually require of data centers?

**Michael Saul Warren** (3:28)
Yeah, it was definitely a talker, that's for sure.
I think that the utilities might have fought the previous bill we were discussing about the membership incentives just as hard, if not harder.
But the data center bill, what it does is it puts data centers in their own class when it comes to defining what rate payers are. So most of us, pretty much all of us, are residential customers of our electric company. If you are a business owner, you're commercial. If you are heavy industry, there's a class for you for industrial users. This creates a dedicated class for data centers. And that means that New Jersey electric companies are going to be able to charge them different rates than they would charge the average homeowner. And the goal here by state leaders is to ensure that data centers are going to be charged what they're calling their fair share. You know, these are facilities that use way more electricity than residential users. So, they want to be charged, they want to be charging them differently to account for that.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:46)
Right. And you reported that data centers are driving demand faster than new supply can come online. Is it known how much of New Jersey's recent utility bill spike traces back to the data center supply and demand mismatch?

**Michael Saul Warren** (5:02)
I don't have a specific number to give you. But analysts agree that the proliferation of data centers in New Jersey and throughout the rest of the PJM footprint, like I said, that's 13 states and it includes parts of Virginia, where data centers around DC have been coming online in droves.