Liam Denning, Columnist

Power Plants’ 833% Windfall May Unleash a Political Firestorm

The biggest US grid will pay a record price to generators to ensure large parts of the mid-Atlantic and Midwest can keep the lights on.

July 31, 2024 at 4:51 PM UTC

By Liam Denning

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Power demand is on the rise.
Photographer: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

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A fifth of Americans are on the hook for an 833% jump in the cost to ensure the lights stay on. The folks being paid that premium, mostly electricity generators in this instance, face that most welcome of problems: What to do with a windfall. Shares in the likes of Constellation Energy Corp. and Vistra Corp. were up by double-digit percentages Wednesday morning.

But they also face an unwelcome complication: Politics.