Well, that didn’t take long. Before the boiling heat of summer has even officially arrived, the lights went out in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region.

More than 100,000 customers in and around New Orleans went without power for most of the day on Sunday when MISO was forced to order rotating outages in Louisiana to preserve the stability of the grid when power demand eclipsed supply.

Just two days before, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued an emergency order to keep the 1,560 MW J.H. Campbell power plant in West Olive, Michigan running through the summer to bolster the MISO grid. While that power plant couldn’t come to the rescue of folks in New Orleans 1,000 miles south, preserving it may save hundreds-of-thousands from a similar fate this summer.

In issuing the emergency order, the Department of Energy (DOE) cited a North American Electric Reliability Corp. summer reliability assessment that found MISO – along with several other grids – faces an elevated risk of power outages during stressed periods of peak demand. DOE also cited MISO’s recent capacity auction which saw prices jump 2,100% from a year earlier—an unmistakable indication of tight operating conditions and the need for more capacity.

Following the auction, MISO reported surplus capacity on the grid fell to about 2.6 gigawatts (GW), down from 4.6 GW last year, a razor-thin margin. “The results reinforce the need to increase capacity, as demand is expected to grow with new large load additions,” MISO said.

Yet, the J.H. Campbell plant was slated for closure this month not because the capacity isn’t needed – the market was screaming otherwise – but because of a regulatory push to eliminate coal from Michigan’s grid. DOE stepped in because the math is simple: grids across the country need more dispatchable capacity, not less. Tearing down existing, well operating power plants amid a supply crisis is nonsensical.

A Grid Pushed to the Limit Just Last Summer

The anti-coal crowd has unsurprisingly blasted DOE’s emergency order, claiming Michigan and the MISO territory the plant serves are sufficiently supplied. But to rebut that claim all one need to do is rewind to last summer to see how essential every MW of dispatchable capacity remains to the MISO grid.

On August 26 of 2024, amidst broiling heat across the Midwest, MISO issued a maximum generation event with power demand soaring to 122 gigawatts (GW). MISO was so short of generation it even needed to import 8 GW of power from PJM, enough to meet the demand of six million homes. And now, facing its own tightening supplies, surplus power from PJM is unlikely to be available for long. PJM expects to be short of capacity during periods of peak demand by 2030, if not sooner.

Following that maximum generation event last summer, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Mark Christie took to Twitter with analysis of the generating sources that shouldered the load and kept the lights on.

In MISO, coal and natural gas supplied roughly 70% of demand during the heatwave’s most intense hours. Together with nuclear power, these dispatchable resources met 90% of demand when it was needed most. On the PJM grid next door, where demand reached 148.3 GW, dispatchable resources also met 90% of demand.

Christie observed, highlighting the importance of dispatchable capacity, “MISO and PJM expect substantial retirements of dispatchables in coming years… Two lessons: 1. Loss of dispatchables threatens reliability. 2. Interregional transmission supports reliability IF there is surplus power to transmit, but if neighboring grid operators lean on each other for imports, both fall down when neither has surplus power to export.”

A 14 GW Capacity Deficit

If grids across the country are stumbling towards capacity shortfalls, which appears to be exactly what is happening according to recent analysis from ICF International, there will be no surplus to share.

Just last summer MISO warned that without delays of power plant retirements it could face a deficit of 14 GW in capacity by 2029—a deficit equivalent to the power needed for 10 million homes. MISO CEO John Bear plainly warned, “we’ve got a lot of work to do to slow down the retirements and speed up the additions coming onto the system.” 

Let’s cross our fingers that another rolling blackout like the one in Louisiana doesn’t hit MISO again this summer. But if the J.H. Campbell plant does help bail out a grid pushed to its limits this summer, let’s hope the very folks criticizing Secretary Wright thoroughly enjoy their air conditioning.