BGE Customers Warned Of Potential Outages After Transmission Line To Brandon Shores Failed

By Christine Condon, Maryland Matters

August 12, 2025

Baltimore Gas & Electric briefly urged customers to conserve electricity Monday afternoon after a transmission facility failure forced a Maryland power plant offline, which could have caused “possible widespread outages.”

By Monday evening, the utility said it believed the problem was solved and the threat had passed. But that came after several hours in which BGE, in a news release, asked its customers to take steps such as turning off nonessential appliances and using less air conditioning, including by closing their blinds and turning on ceiling fans. It also urged ratepayers to set aside supplies of food and water, and charge critical electronic devices in case of an outage.

“We are asking all BGE customers to conserve electricity beginning immediately and through this evening. Energy conservation helps reduce the potential for an outage,” read the news release. “If an outage becomes necessary, we will make every effort to alert customers in advance.”

A BGE transmission facility that serves the Brandon Shores coal-fired power plant in Anne Arundel County failed at about 3 a.m. Monday, according to a spokesperson for Talen Energy, which owns the plant. By Monday afternoon, “electricity demand briefly exceeded the current capacity of the local transmission system,” according to PJM Interconnection which runs the utility grid serving Maryland.

At 3:52 p.m., PJM directed BGE to lower flows across overloaded lines, resulting in “limited outages” to customers, wrote PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields. That directive was canceled by 4:20 p.m, after BGE restored parts of the transmission system.

“We expect that BGE will soon be returning to service those customers who were shed as part of our original directive,” Shields wrote. “Continued reliable operation of the local transmission system will depend upon the operability of the transmission facilities that tripped this morning, but for now, the system is in a place such that we can serve our peak evening demand in the area.”

The Brandon Shores plant was scheduled to shut down in May, along with Talen’s nearby oil-burning H.A. Wagner plant. But amid rising demand for power, regulators compelled the facilities to stay open through May 2029 using a “reliability must-run” agreement. Ratepayers are footing the $180 million annual bill.

The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel has argued that ratepayers are essentially paying twice for the “must run” agreement, since the two plants were excluded from a key energy auction held in 2024, raising prices considerably. The People’s Counsel is pushing federal regulators to return $5 billion in auction proceeds to customers as a result.

When the transmission failure occurred Monday morning, Brandon Shores’ Unit 1 and Unit 2 facilities were both operating, but “tripped offline” because of the infrastructure failure, wrote Taryne Williams, a spokesperson for Talen Energy, in a statement.

The first of those units cannot contribute power to the grid until BGE repairs the infrastructure, Williams wrote. As of Monday afternoon, though, the second unit was “available for power generation upon completion of the start-up process.” The same was true for the nearby H.A. Wagner plant, which is served by the same transmission infrastructure, Williams said.

Asked about the outage during a news conference Monday, Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) was quick to say that the infrastructure issue impacting Brandon Shores was distinct from the energy supply constraints that were discussed in the legislature earlier this year.

“This is not a matter of there being a lack of supply in the marketplace right now, which is something that we have been talking about the potential of in several years,” Ferguson said. “This is — as you would expect in the case of a thunderstorm or lightning storm — when a pole goes down and the transmission has to be rerouted. That’s what we’re seeing here, except in this case, it was a substation that was taking in electricity and distributing it across the grid from a pretty major transmission station.”