Alarm Bells Are Sounding for the Grid: Answering Them Takes More Than Megawatts

Matt Green

Mon, August 10, 2026 astatine 10:45 AM CDT 7 min read

The PJM Interconnection acceptable an all-time highest request grounds connected July 2 of this year, preliminarily estimated astatine much than 168,000 MW. That broke a people that had stood since 2006. There were nary rolling blackouts, and the commentary that followed carried a enactment of relief, adjacent congratulation: the strategy held up. That is true. It is besides dangerously incomplete.Consider the ledger of what holding up required:

• Two national exigency orders nether Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, 1 waiving biology limits truthful plants could tally past licence restrictions and 1 authorizing forced curtailment of information centers onto backup generation.

• A callback of generators from scheduled maintenance.

• Activation of exigency request response.

• Operating reserves astir halved successful a azygous time to astir 5,100 MW.

• And day-ahead prices topping $2,000/MWh successful parts of the footprint, astir triple a comparable highest a twelvemonth earlier.

COMMENTARY

It was the 3rd national exigency involution for PJM successful 2026 alone, among dozens of specified orders issued crossed North American grid operators this year. As I constitute this, different blistery upwind alert and exigency bid petition are successful effect for the aforesaid footprint.When national exigency powers go regular operating procedure, the strategy is not holding up. It is operating astatine its ceiling. And the customers who kept their lights connected paid triple for the privilege, which means the lawsuit that operations survived is 1 that affordability did not.

EP+DPX:

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None of this should astonishment us. NERC's latest Long-Term Reliability Assessment projects summertime highest request could surge by 224 GW and wintertime highest by 245 GW implicit the adjacent decade, upward revisions of 69% and 65% from projections made 1 twelvemonth earlier. And arsenic Power Magazine's sum of the study captured, NERC's John Moura has already named the required response: the manufacture "must determination beyond margin-only thinking" toward probabilistic and vigor hazard analysis, treating ample loads arsenic portion of strategy readying alternatively than specified request forecasts.Moura is right, and successful my acquisition astir inferior leaders already hold with him. The harder question is nary longer whether to follow probabilistic planning. It is however to really execute it. Because July 2 was not an anomaly; it was a preview. Customers are deploying flexible resources, from rooftop star and batteries to managed EV charging, faster than inferior readying and operations tin sorb them. Capacity constraints are colliding with a caller epoch of hazard defined by utmost upwind and cyber threats. The readying processes, operating practices and regulatory constructs that served the manufacture for a period were built for a satellite of stable, predictable demand, and that satellite is gone. Utilities are being pushed to the bounds of what the existent operating strategy tin deliver, and regulators request to spot that cliff earlier the manufacture reaches it, not done different exigency order, but done the plan.