well about a week from now you can expect to start seeing higher costs on your electric bills That's when utility rates in New Jersey are set to increase anywhere from 17 to 20% depending on your provider Lawmakers met this week to take up a number of bills they say are aimed at fixing the root problems of these rate hikes Senior correspondent Joanna Gagas reports as part of our under the dome series exploring the state government and its impact on the people who live here In just about a week New Jersey residents will feel the pain of energy prices spiking by about 20% Several factors contributed to that increase and yesterday lawmakers in Trenton moved forward some bills aimed at addressing them Clearly one of the big issues on the table today is the cost of energy Everybody is looking for ways to reduce the cost Some of the bills require the Board of Public Utilities or BPU to help create more energy business and energy storage in the state especially for solar and make the approval process easier and cheaper While large-scale solar projects are important they are often facing multi-year delays in the PJM interconnection queue By establishing automatic solar permitting this bill offers a practical efficient and proven approach to streamlining renewable energy deployment It would significantly lower the soft costs associated with going solar making it more affordable for all New Jersey families regardless of income One expert said they modeled what savings could have been in New Jersey if more energy had been online before PJM's last energy auction PJM is the regional transmission operator for New Jersey We said what if we had 500 megawatts of storage in place and what if we had a,000 The results of that analysis is a reduced cost to New Jersey customers to the tune of a hundred to $200 million in a single year One sector has come into focus in the conversation around energy costs and that's data centers Several bills look at the impact they're having on the state's energy needs as well as the amount of water that's required to cool the systems that run AI Those got some push back from business and industry leaders We can't entice data centers to locate in New Jersey if we're going to continually be putting roadblocks in the way or making it more expensive or problematic to develop here in New Jersey Uh we we recognize that data centers are large energy users but they're not the only large energy users I have not heard BIA being concerned about all the other members who are going to feel the rate increases Have you actually asked your other members if they really want BIA to take this position when your members are going to feel the increase in rates We're very concerned about rate increases and but we think those rate increases again we're lacking capacity and we have put forth proposals where we could um put in new natural gas electric generation uh in a fairly quick manner by using existing sites or former sites that have all the uh distribution and transmission systems you know in place so we could get there fairly quick We support connecting more solar on you know quickly and we support legislation to do that So the answer from our perspective is not to try to discourage large users energy from locating New Jersey Others pointed out that data centers have not been known to create many jobs but a key to bringing cost down is also modernizing the energy grid that moves energy from its source into homes and businesses The BPU has approved new rules that'll help do that The modernization as we think about it is mostly about cost and using technologies that help us to make better use of the grid So we don't have to build as many poles and wires PS are expensive but uh we have more and more technologies available to us that uh allow us to keep the grid reliable at lower cost For instance if you install a battery at strategic locations you can sometimes make sure that you don't have to build poles and wires to get the electrons from A and B And that's often a much more cost effective solution While legislators debate how and where to develop new energy sources for New Jersey some are also asking the BPU to investigate PJM and how it runs its auctions that ultimately impact market rates for electricity We are going to have great pain here not because of anything New Jersey did And by the way I want to be very loud and clear about this Some people are saying well these rate increases that may happen are all because of New Jersey's policy on clean energy That's just you know that that's a veil That's a red herring in this discussion There's obviously plenty of electricity to be had if you're willing to pay 10 times what you paid the year before So you know we we look at that bid process as not being an honest one The bill to investigate the BPU advanced out of committee along party lines Many of the other bills moved unanimously in Trenton I'm Joanna Gagas NJ Spotlight News This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a private corporation funded by the American people