PJM Interconnection, the nonprofit that manages the country’s largest electricity grid region, is barely known by the general public and almost never mentioned by elected officials—except when something bad happens.

Well, something bad has happened. For two years in a row, PJM’s process for ensuring the grid has sufficient power plant capacity has resulted in record high prices , which will get passed on to consumers. The results are tied to rising electricity demand for data centers and a bottleneck in approving grid connections for new projects.

Almost everything about these events is bound up in layers of complexity.

To explain what’s happening, my colleague Rambo Talabong put together some charts and I spoke with energy policy experts. Together, we aim to make this situation underst

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