November 20, 2025
Pennsylvania, with a single project, will add almost as much carbon-free electricity to the grid as all the wind and solar that New York has built during its entire 20-year membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
So why exactly are environmental activists so worked up that Pennsylvania dropped out of RGGI as part of a bipartisan budget deal?
“By trading away RGGI, Governor Shapiro has sacrificed progress on climate and air pollution based on politics that prioritize industry over our children’s health,” said a spokeswoman for Moms Clean Air Force.
“The decision to walk away from RGGI without a robust replacement sets the Commonwealth back, leaving Pennsylvania without a clear path forward,” according to the group Evergreen Action.
“If you’re not going to join RGGI,” asked one Penn State professor, “what are you going to do?”1
The answer is that Pennsylvania will keep doing the things that have made it a national leader in producing carbon-free electricity.
Only three states2 produce more carbon-free electricity from wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear than Pennsylvania, and the Commonwealth has done it without a carbon tax or excessive legal mandates.
Nonetheless, the General Assembly is considering proposals that would place a carbon-tax on Pennsylvania’s electric generation (PACER)3 and would require far more wind, solar, and other carbon-free sources (PRESS).4
Yet when it comes to carbon-free electricity, wind and solar can’t deliver the way nuclear can. Constellation Energy’s restart of the former Three Mile Island Reactor 1, scheduled to join the PJM grid in 2027, will by itself produce nearly twice as much carbon-free electricity as all of Pennsylvania’s wind and solar plants combined.5
The developed section of Three Mile Island (renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center) takes up less land than Downtown Pittsburgh from Point State Park to Grant Street. A solar facility that could match the annual output of the restarted Reactor 1 would require nearly every square mile of the entire city.6
And yet, the carbon-free electricity from the restarted reactor would not count toward the state’s requirement to provide “electric energy generated from renewable and environmentally beneficial sources” should House Bill 501, known as the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standards Act, become law.
“Six years ago, the closure of this plant symbolized more than a decade of policy failures that focused only on new clean energy resources that couldn’t match the reliability of nuclear energy, and both the security of our energy grid and air quality suffered,” Constellation president and CEO Joe Dominguez said while describing the Crane/Three Mile Island project. “It’s critical that we look to Crane as a reminder of the consequences of not learning from past mistakes.”
Yet environmental activists continue to insist that carbon taxes and mandates are the way to go.
“The state has just lost the most immediate lever it could pull, and which would've done so in a significant, unprecedented way in Pennsylvania history to cut climate pollution, create jobs, and lower people's electricity bills,” Robert Routh of the Natural Resources Defense Council said of Pennsylvania dropping RGGI.
But RGGI has been a disaster on its own terms, which is to reduce the amount of carbon emissions from power generation. The two biggest generating states in RGGI, New York and New Jersey, both produce less carbon-free electricity today than when they joined five other states to establish RGGI in 2005.
They certainly built more wind and solar plants. But they also shut down nuclear power plants, and the loss of that carbon-free electricity dwarfed the amount coming from renewables.
Vermont, another of the RGGI founding states, today produces just 35% of the carbon-free electricity it did in 2005, thanks to the closure of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.
In a new analysis, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looked at the factors that have led to electricity price changes over the past five years.7 The study did not examine the direct impact of RGGI. But it analyzed what happened when states required more wind and solar generation than the market would otherwise produce, as the Pennsylvania PRESS proposal (HB 501) would.
In the section titled State renewable portfolio standards are associated with recent prices increases, the study explains:
“It is therefore expected that RPS policies will often raise retail prices, especially in states with more-costly renewable energy supplies…Our analysis generally supports this expectation.”
“Those states – especially in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions – with relatively lower-quality wind and solar resources have often tended to experience larger price increases.”
Because of its weather and topography, Pennsylvania’s solar plants are 31% less efficient than the U.S. average8 and Pennsylvania’s wind farms are 25% less efficient than the U.S average,9 according to the Energy Information Administration.
Ken Zapinski
412-352-4364; ken@pghworks.com
