Pennsylvania is the nation’s largest net exporter of electricity and its second-largest energy producer. Natural resource abundance is not the problem. Neither is investor interest.
Over the past seven years, the commonwealth ran the experiment in both directions.With the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), Pennsylvania spent six years threatening a carbon tax, and investment left. The November 2025 budget settled the question, and investment came back.
Pennsylvania generated 246.7 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, more than any other state in the PJM Interconnection region, and exported 89 million megawatt-hours, nearly double the next-highest state.
The generation mix has changed substantially. Between 2018 and 2025, natural gas rose from 35.5 percent of Pennsylvania’s generation to 58.3 percent. Nuclear fell from 38.8 to 30.4 percent. Coal fell from 17.1 percent to 4.3 percent. Waste coal, wind, hydro, biomass, and solar together account for the remaining 7 percent. Natural gas and nuclear now produce 88.7 percent of Pennsylvania’s electricity.
Between 2019 and 2024, new generation proposals in Pennsylvania fell 38 percent while Ohio’s grew 33 percent, a 71-point swing between two states that share the same shale, wholesale market, and federal rules.
Pennsylvania’s completions from 2019 to 2021 (4,881 megawatts) were almost entirely projects proposed before RGGI. Once that backlog cleared, completions collapsed: just 648 megawatts across 2022 to 2024. Specifically for natural gas, Ohio brought 3,265 megawatts into operation during Pennsylvania’s RGGI window. The Keystone State brought next to nothing and proposed no new utility-scale gas generation at all between 2019 and 2023.
Even though legal injunctions blocked the RGGI carbon tax, the credible threat alone was sufficient to send power plant builders out of Pennsylvania. Conservatively, Pennsylvania forfeited 3,800 to 4,800 megawatts of generating capacity to those six years of uncertainty. At $1,000 per kilowatt, that amounts to about $4 to $5 billion in market-tested investment that went elsewhere or never happened.
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