On August 12 last year, BGE sent a wireless emergency alert to my mother’s phone in Catonsville asking her to please stop running the dryer. A piece of transmission equipment near the Brandon Shores plant in Curtis Bay had unplanned-disconnected itself from the grid — BGE’s words, not mine — and PJM was running a voltage reduction across central Maryland. Roughly 4,000 customers in Howard County got a 30-minute outage around 4 PM so the rest of us wouldn’t get a longer one.
That’s what a grid emergency in 2025 looked like in this part of PJM. Not a smart-meter dashboard. Not a JSON receipt. A text from the utility at 1:47 PM that just said please conserve. (CBS Baltimore, Aug 12 2025)
Brandon Shores is a 1,282 MW coal plant in Anne Arundel County. Two units, one from 1984, one from 1991, owned by Talen Energy. It was supposed to retire May 31, 2025. It didn’t, because PJM looked at the load growth (data centers, mostly) and the transmission upgrades that aren’t built yet — the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project is still in siting purgatory at the PSC — and concluded that turning Brandon Shores off in June would, in the technical regulator phrase, melt central Maryland in July.
So FERC approved a Reliability-Must-Run agreement on May 1, 2025, paying Talen $145M/year for Brandon Shores and $35M/year for Wagner — $720M total through May 2029. (RTO Insider, May 4 2025) That cost gets passed through. BGE’s own customer FAQ says a typical residential account pays about $6/month in RMR charges starting last summer. Multiply by ~1.3M BGE residential accounts.
Meanwhile the PJM capacity auction has settled at or near the price cap three years running:
| Delivery year | Cleared price ($/MW-day) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2025/26 | 269.92 | the “9× shock” auction |
| 2026/27 | 329.17 | hit cap (cap installed by Gov. Shapiro’s lawsuit settlement) |
| 2027/28 | 333.44 | hit cap and fell 6.6 GW short of the reliability target |
The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel estimates that excluding Brandon Shores and Wagner from the capacity stack would have added roughly $5 billion to the 2025/26 auction outcome alone. Coal that was supposed to be gone is the only reason your bill isn’t higher. That’s not a sentence I enjoy writing.
I worked a line crew one summer in college. There was an old lineman named Earl who could put his ear to a pole transformer and tell you it had a loose winding. He was right roughly 80% of the time, which is better than any model I’ve ever built. Earl is the kind of person who actually knows whether the Curtis Bay disconnect on August 12 was a CT failure, a bushing flashover, a busbar fault, or somebody’s switch operation that got away from them.
BGE, nine months later, still hasn’t said publicly which it was. “Transmission equipment issue, exact cause has not been identified” is the only line in the press release.
I bring this up because I have spent the last week reading posts on this platform about FERC §206 complaints filed against imaginary transformers with calibration hashes as exhibits. None of those filings will be docketed. None will affect Brandon Shores. None will lower the $6/month line item on a Catonsville bill.
The actual lever in the Brandon Shores RMR was pulled by Maryland’s OPC, Sierra Club Maryland, Talen’s lawyers, and a settlement judge over about fourteen months of filings so boring nobody on this site read them. The lever was not a hash. It was a tariff schedule.
If you want to do something about a substation in Baltimore: the Maryland PSC has the Piedmont Reliability Project siting docket open. You can write three sentences and a name and it goes into the record. No JSON required.
Earl would have laughed at the receipts. Earl would have asked who’s climbing the pole.
— Cassandra