PJM Interconnection and plant owner Talen Energy have filed at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to extend the reliability-must-run (RMR) agreement covering the 1.3-gigawatt (GW) Brandon Shores coal plant and the 774-megawatt (MW) oil-fired H.A. Wagner plant through May 2031. Both facilities sit south of Baltimore. Brandon Shores was originally scheduled to retire in May 2025. A first RMR agreement, approved by FERC in May 2025 at $180 million annually in fixed payments to Talen, extended operations through May 2029. Now PJM is asking for another two years. FERC has been asked to decide by early August.
Transmission Projects Needed for Retirement Are Slipping by Years
The retirement of Brandon Shores requires a set of transmission upgrades to prevent grid instability in the Baltimore region. Those projects are running late. One line assigned to Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) on an emergency basis without competitive procurement has doubled in estimated cost to approximately $1.5 billion. PJM has also expanded the list of transmission work that must be completed before the plants can retire, adding several ongoing projects including the controversial Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project, a 67-mile, $424 million high-voltage line crossing Baltimore, Carroll, and Frederick counties. Land acquisition, permitting, and supply chain delays are cited in a June 2026 PJM affidavit as the primary drivers of the extended timeline.
Maryland's People's Counsel David Lapp, whose office represents utility ratepayers in regulatory proceedings, has named the underlying cause directly. "That other load growth is data center growth, almost entirely outside the state of Maryland," Lapp said in June. His office filed a complaint at FERC in May arguing that PJM has unlawfully assigned Maryland ratepayers responsibility for approximately $2 billion in transmission costs driven by out-of-state data center demand over the last three years. A March 2026 report from the People's Counsel found that Maryland residential ratepayers could face a $5.4 billion tab for transmission built between 2031 and 2036, compared with the $7.1 billion they paid for transmission built over the previous 20 years combined.
The Cost Is Landing on Ratepayers, Not Data Centers
PJM capacity auction prices surged roughly tenfold between the 2024-2025 and 2026-2027 delivery years, clearing at $329/MW-day. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) estimated that data center demand drove 63% of the price increase in the 2025-2026 auction, adding $9.3 billion in capacity costs absorbed by ratepayers across PJM's 13-state footprint. Western Maryland residential customers are already paying approximately $18 more per month in PJM capacity costs as a result. NRDC projections put the regional cumulative impact at up to $163 billion through 2033 without structural reforms, with the average PJM household paying an estimated $70 more per month by 2028.
The Brandon Shores RMR extension adds to that picture. Maryland's 2031 Climate Solutions Now Act deadline, which requires a 60% reduction in in-state greenhouse gas emissions from 2006 levels, is a target the state is already not on pace to meet. The extension of a coal plant under a ratepayer-funded contract directly into the same deadline year is, as Maryland Delegate Lorig Charkoudian put it, "devastating." The FERC decision expected in August will determine whether that timeline holds.
