Another front-page, clear-as-a-bell story by Paul Adams describing developments in the Maryland electricity market. This one is about how BGE customers will pay $100 more per year to send price incentives to companies that might be thinking of building new generation capacity. The ordinary, sky-high price of electricity wasn't enough of an incentive to generators, reasoned PJM Interconnection, the grid manager for the Mid-Atlantic. So they padded the bill with an extra "capacity" charge that is nothing but pure profit for generation companies such as Constellation Energy, BGE's parent. And still hardly anybody is building new generation.

No wonder Pittsburgh's Duquesne Light is quitting the PJM grid and joining the Midwestern grid, which it can do because it's right on the border. The Midwestern grid doesn't have "capacity" charges that pay generators for merely existing. BGE can't secede because it's stuck in the heart of PJM territory.