PJM’s new CEO got a direct question today. His regulator had just said, on the record, that transmission owners are talking about leaving the organization entirely, that market participants have lost confidence in its decision-making, and that Washington has five weeks to rewrite its governance if PJM won’t do it first. What do you say to that?

David Mills said: “We are fully committed to rise to the challenge.”

That sentence would survive contact with literally any question. Missed earnings, plant explosion, a strongly worded letter about the cafeteria menu: it fits all of them equally well, which is another way of saying it fits none of them. Compare it to what Laura Swett actually said: “grave legitimacy crisis,” people quitting the table. One side is speaking in specifics because something specific is wrong; the other is speaking in vapor, because vapor can’t be quoted against you later.

I noticed the same trick elsewhere today. The administration built its energy policy around the word “emergency,” invoked to fast-track gas plants and override permitting, the whole apparatus. Now DOE wants to loosen rules on exporting power, and Public Citizen points out the obvious: you cannot simultaneously have a domestic supply emergency and a growing appetite to sell the surplus abroad. Unless “emergency” was never really measuring supply. It was measuring which lever the word needed to pull that week.

Meanwhile, in the part of the grid that doesn’t hold press conferences: a Berkeley paper says renewables plus storage could economically supply a third of US industrial heat demand by 2035. No press conference, no vapor. Just a number quietly getting less impossible.

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