New Jersey finds all four utilities' PJM voting reports incomplete

New Jersey's four electric utilities had to tell the state, for the first time, how they voted inside PJM Interconnection, and none of them told the whole story. A summary report the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities sent to the Governor and Legislature on October 14, 2026 finds that Atlantic City Electric (ACE), Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L), Public Service Electric and Gas (PSE&G) and Rockland Electric (RECO) all left out votes, explanations or both, even after months of revisions. The board found compliance "uniformly deficient: no utility fully complied with the reporting requirement," per its release.

The disclosure law, P.L. 2025, c. 129, was approved and took effect on August 15, 2025. By February 1 each year, each utility must list every recorded vote it and its affiliates cast at any PJM committee, user group, task force or similar body in the prior calendar year, "regardless of whether the vote is disclosed by PJM," and briefly explain whether each vote furthers the state's affordability, reliability and sustainability goals and the purposes of three named state energy and climate laws. That fills a real gap: PJM publishes voting reports only for its two senior committees, the board says, while proposals take shape in the subcommittees and task forces below them.

The definition of a recorded vote is deliberately wide. It "includes proposals that were endorsed by acclamation when the electric public utility was in attendance." The board's report says most of the hundreds of votes cast at PJM in 2025 could be described as ministerial and were endorsed by acclamation, so a complete report is largely a ledger of routine assent, with the contested items somewhere inside it.

What the revised reports still missed

All four utilities filed on time, and all four first reports had the same three problems, according to the board: they covered only votes from August 15, 2025 to year end, only the senior and standing committees, and gave little or no explanation of whether a vote advanced state policy. The utilities said they had not kept the same level of detail on votes before the law took effect. Staff sent deficiency notices on March 3, 2026, met all four utilities with the state Division of Law on March 18, and met each one individually several times between March and June.

The revised reports, filed between May and August, closed some gaps and not others:

• RECO (May 15) covered all of 2025 but gave no explanations for votes before the law took effect, which its cover letter says is because the requirement "did not apply until the law became effective on August 15, 2025." It reported mostly Members Committee and Markets and Reliability Committee votes. The report's appendix lists 35 RECO votes missing from its filing, seven of them from September through November 2025.
• PSE&G (June 5) covered the full year with explanations and was "the most detailed and complete of the submitted reports," in the board's words. Staff found three unreported votes, and the report's executive summary adds three explanations that did not sufficiently say whether a vote advanced state policies.
• ACE (June 25) says in its filing that it did not start tracking votes for the law until August 15, 2025, so its report omits earlier votes except those in the two senior committees and gives no explanations for the earlier votes it does list. The appendix lists 39 missing ACE votes, all dated January 7 through August 6, 2025.
• JCP&L (August 5) said whether each vote related to New Jersey's energy policies but generally not whether its vote advanced them. The report's executive summary says five JCP&L votes went unreported; its utility-by-utility section says seven, and the appendix lists seven.

Two of the four do not even cast their own votes at the top tables. ACE and JCP&L are affiliate members, the report says; ACE's voting member is Exelon Business Services and JCP&L's is listed as Monongahela Power. The law counts votes cast by a utility's affiliates as well.

Small votes, big auctions

The most complete filer also argued that its votes barely register. PSE&G opened its report by noting that sector-weighted voting gives it about 1.5% of the total vote at PJM's senior standing committees, where votes are binding, and about 0.4% in standing committees and task forces, where they are advisory. "Therefore, PJM's rules mean that PSE&G has little ability to influence any voting outcome at PJM," the cover letter says.

The July 2026 capacity auction cleared at the $325.00 per MW-day price cap instead of the $554.72 per MW-day that new demand-curve parameters would have produced without it, the board's report says, and those parameters came through 2025's stakeholder votes. In the quadrennial review of the capacity demand curve, one of five notable 2025 items the report walks through, a majority of advisory votes at the Markets and Reliability Committee went to a joint PJM and Pennsylvania PUC proposal; the Members Committee endorsed it and FERC approved the new parameters. A price collar extended to every auction held through the end of 2026 has kept them from biting so far.

Another item was the fast-path process on large loads, where no package voted on at the November 19, 2025 Members Committee came close to two-thirds sector-weighted support. One concept the PJM Board advanced afterward, the Interim Resource Adequacy Service, is the curtailment plan FERC rejected on October 9, 2026.

States have no vote anywhere in this. State commissions can participate in PJM's stakeholder process but cannot vote, the report notes, which leaves New Jersey grading the votes of utilities that can. The board's release ties the findings to the October 8 Governors' Summit on the State of PJM in Chicago, where governors formalized the PJM Governors' Collaborative; New Jersey is a participant. "Because states are accountable to the public, they should have real influence over the decisions PJM makes," said Board President Ben Hertz-Shargel.

No order yet

The law has no enforcement mechanism of its own. The board says it could use its general authority under N.J.S.A. 48:2-42 to enforce its orders, but it has not issued an order in these dockets. As this is the first reporting year, it is "inclined to provide the EDCs some leeway with their reports," and it will set the expectation that detailed explanations are required for votes in every stakeholder meeting, from the senior committees down. "The Board will not hesitate to use the tools at its disposal to enforce full compliance in future reporting years," the report says. Under the statute, the next reports, covering 2026, are due February 1, 2027.