Last winter, when temperatures plunged across the region, thousands of South Carolina residents lost power. It was a similar story in North Carolina and Tennessee. In the immediate aftermath, supporters of forcing the Palmetto State to join an organization called PJM, that links electrical grids across 13 states and the District of Columbia, proclaimed this power outage as proof that joining PJM would be a smart decision.

As often is the case, when people speak before they know all the facts, they soon regret it. This would be true for those PJM supporters, because South Carolina lost power in part because PJM could not provide the state with the electricity they were contractually obligated to sell. In other words, the South Carolina outage was partly the fault of PJM. So, why should South Carolina join PJM?

The allure of PJM, and other similar Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) is that multiple states link their electrical grids which are in turn are managed by a central authority called the RTO. The idea is that there is strength in numbers.