The energy transition is often described as an infrastructure challenge. Having recently completed my board service at PJM Interconnection, the largest regional grid operator in the United States, and after studying the extensive public record surrounding today’s governance debates, I’m increasingly convinced it’s something else: a decision-speed problem.
Across the country, many of the technologies needed to support electrification, data-center growth, and grid reliability already exist. Capital is available. Forecasting tools are improving. Yet projects still move slowly. And when they do move, commitments are often made faster than the institutions governing them can resolve who bears the associated risks.
That gap has consequences. And they are not distributed evenly.
Having worked across critical infrastructure and grid governance, I’ve seen many energy transition delays stem from institutional misalignment — and what happens when institutions move forward anyway. Those risks are frequently transferred to the stakeholders with the least direct representation in the decision-making process. And in electricity markets, that is often the customer.
The electric power sector was built around institutions that evolved over decades. Utilities, regulators, regional grid operators, developers, investors, municipalities, consumer advocates, and equipment suppliers all perform individual important functions. But they operate under different incentives, authorities, timelines, and accountability structures. And as the energy transition accelerates, this misalignment has become an impediment.
The problem in action
According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, interconnection queues had grown to over 2,0600 gigawatts of proposed capacity nationwide by the end of 2025, nearly twice the existing U.S. generating fleet. The projects are not waiting on technology. They are waiting on a process that requires dozens of entities to sequence studies, share costs, and make binding commitments in coordination with one another.
Transmission permitting tells a similar story. Utilities frequently know where new lines are needed years before construction begins. The delays accumulate not in engineering but in the sequence of regulatory approvals, landowner negotiations, environmental reviews, and interagency sign-offs that no single institution controls.
Data center load growth is now stress-testing both processes simultaneously. When a hyperscaler announces a multi-gigawatt campus, it triggers interconnection requests, transmission studies, utility resource planning updates, and local permitting processes that each run on different timelines, governed by different institutions, with no single body responsible for aligning them. As a result, a market has emerged for solutions that can help stakeholders evaluate interconnection options more quickly, offered by startups like Nira Energy, Paces, and Gridraven. An example of this dynamic is unfolding in PJM. Market participants are debating how new generation should be procured through PJM’s proposed Reliability Backstop Auction and who should pay. However, the institution is simultaneously confronting questions about counterparty default, project abandonment, and long-term performance obligations across 15-year commitments.
PJM’s own March 2026 credit risk analysis identified those risks explicitly, including long-duration exposure and the absence of tariff-based liquidated damages for certain failure scenarios. But the RTO’s April 2026 procurement design presentation focused on procurement mechanics, without publicly appearing to resolve the risk questions identified just weeks earlier. If those questions remain unresolved while commitments move forward, the resulting risks may ultimately be borne by customers through higher costs or reduced reliability.
The consequences of slow decision-making
The pattern extends beyond market design. Effective oversight depends on whether decision-makers have independent access to the information and analytical capacity needed to evaluate competing risk assessments. Complex institutions fail when decision-makers no longer receive independent information, when dissenting views become unwelcome, or when risk assessments are filtered through organizational incentives. Governance structures matter not only because they determine who makes decisions, but also because they shape how information reaches the decision-makers, and whether inconvenient conclusions are allowed to surface at all.
Developers, utilities, generators, transmission owners, and regulators all have direct representation in the processes that determine how costs and financial risks are allocated — but end use customers generally do not. They appear indirectly through commissions, consumer advocates, and elected officials, even though they’re the ones that will end up paying for unresolved risk.
Capacity markets illustrate the dynamic plainly: Capacity payments function as reliability insurance, and customers pay the premiums. Tom Rutigliano of the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated last year that cumulative PJM capacity costs could reach $163 billion by 2032–33 if projected load growth continues to outpace new supply and current market structures remain largely unchanged — and that the public will bear the vast majority of those costs.
Decision speed is therefore not merely an efficiency concern. It is increasingly a question of accountability that directly affects what families and businesses pay for electricity.
Resilience investments follow the same logic. Communities often recognize vulnerabilities long before resilience projects are deployed. Utilities understand reliability risks. Regulators understand affordability concerns. Investors recognize long-term opportunities. But still, resilience infrastructure may fail to materialize not only because of insufficient capital, but because governance mechanisms have not evolved as quickly as the commitments being made around them.
Speed with accountability
The energy transition will still require enormous physical investment. Nothing about institutional alignment eliminates the need for transmission, generation, storage, or distribution upgrades.
But speed without accountability is its own form of infrastructure failure. Energy leaders should begin treating decision-making capacity — the ability to identify risks and resolve who bears them before commitments are finalized — as infrastructure in its own right.
The regions that build faster, more accountable decision mechanisms may ultimately build physical infrastructure faster as well. The ones that don’t may find that both the costs of delay and the costs of moving too quickly without resolving risk fall on the same people: the customers who had the least say in either outcome.
The most promising reforms may not be about giving customer-ratepayers more votes. They may be about requiring institutions to explicitly answer for who pays if the underlying assumptions prove wrong — before major decisions are finalized.
Those questions need to be asked systemically because today no institution is legally charged with representing ratepayers’ interests in wholesale market risk allocation.
In fact, PJM has argued in FERC proceedings that its board owes fiduciary obligations to the PJM Interconnection LLC organization itself. This raises an important governance question: Because wholesale market outcomes ultimately affect approximately 67 million electricity customers, how should the institutional interests of the organization be balanced with the public-interest objectives the organization was created to serve?
In my view, meaningful reform begins with governance standards on par with those expected of publicly traded companies, including whistleblower protections that encourage employees and leaders to raise material risks without fear of retaliation, recognizing that effective governance depends not only on information being reported, but also on institutions being willing to hear and act upon it.
FERC’s technical conference on PJM governance, which is upcoming on July 23, is an opportunity to learn how to close gaps like these, gaps that may also exist within other critical infrastructure institutions where the cost of raising inconvenient concerns falls on individuals, while the cost of ignoring them falls on the public.
Dr. Jeanine Johnson spent five years on the board of the PJM Interconnection, and is currently CEO and co-founder of the cybersecurity platform Immutaverse. The opinions represented in this contributed article are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the views of Latitude Media or any of its staff.
