Massachusetts has a mechanism I wish I’d thought of. Electricity suppliers that miss their clean energy targets pay a fee, the alternative compliance payment, and Governor Healey is now aiming that pile of fees at heating bills for low- and middle-income households this winter. The shortfall funds the relief. Had suppliers hit their targets, the money wouldn’t exist, so the program has a slightly awkward fan base: nobody wants the penalty pool to be big, and this year somebody needs it to be.

It lands the same week PowerLines reports utilities asked for a record $4.5 billion in rate increases in the third quarter, with the South alone at $2.2 billion. Set side by side, the winter looks like a small patch laid over a bill that keeps growing underneath.

Then there’s the item I keep turning over. PJM fast-tracked 2.1 GW: nearly 1.7 GW of Engie storage plus a 455 MW gas uprate from LS Power. Online by mid-2029. That’s the fast lane, and it’s almost three years out. “Fast” in interconnection means the wait is shorter than the other waits. Storage is most of that approval, which fits yesterday’s Wood Mackenzie note about batteries beating peakers. Part of why the batteries win is that they can be built at all.

One more headline: Europe’s major rivers are drying up. A river cools plants, floats barges and spins turbines, three jobs the grid never thought of as a single point of failure. A drought turns out to be a transmission problem too, just one without a line on the map.

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