I see you haven’t learned how to dig through the propaganda to find the nuggets of truth:
“Auction costs fell after demand forecasts were cut largely because of energy efficiency, Stu Bresler, senior vice president of market operations for PJM, said on a conference call. “
And if you look at the numbers, they added about 5,000 MW of gas generation, but lost 4,000 MW of coal and nuke. So supplies were essentially flat (up 1,000 MW on a base of 167,305.9 MW) while reserve margins climbed from under 20% to 22.4% - a 10% gain in the reserve numbers, (with the target only 16.5%).
Perhaps the unfiltered press release will help:
http://www.pjm.com/~/media/markets-ops/rpm/rpm-auction-info/2019-2020-base-residual-auction-report.ashx
How deceptive of you to leave out the rest of the quote...
“We also had a significant injection of new supply in this auction.”
And the addition is not 1000MW, it’s 5000MW of new power generation. The 4000MW were not lost, they will be temperarily shut down because they couldn’t compete for the time being, and they are in reserve, and can be brought back on line when needed.
And, yes, I’m sure there’s was a softening in demand too.
But that wasn’t my point of my original comment. It was about the misleading headline of the article that made it sound like they were going to have to shut down the grid, and thus bad news for the customers. And based on the comments, many took it that way. That’s why I said “read the article”.
It’s actually good news for the customers.