What a week for congressional attention on grid reliability.

A brutal heatwave is pushing the supply of power to its very limit in grids stretching across much of the country. Outages have already hit parts of New York City, while the PJM Interconnection and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) grids have both issued “maximum generation alerts” calling on every available power plant to meet peak demand. The Department of Energy also issued an emergency waiver to allow generators in the Southeast to operate at their maximum capacity to preserve reliability. Keeping the lights on and ACs running is taking a tremendous amount of skill and equal amount of luck.

While our supply of power is pushed to its very limit, the House Energy and Commerce committee held a markup on legislation designed to help the electric grid meet soaring power demand. While today’s challenges are daunting, looming on the horizon is extraordinary demand growth. Balancing supply and demand will only get harder from here on out.

The committee marked up 13 bills, which do everything from easing permitting for energy infrastructure to giving federal reliability regulators the authority to intervene if proposed early plant retirements threaten the grid. This package of bills is an important step towards providing the tools needed to better shore up our supply of power and handle the extraordinary demand coming from electrification and the AI data center boom.

The data center industry has made it abundantly clear: its growth is dependent on the availability of reliable, affordable power. And in the AI energy race, the U.S. risks falling far behind China.

As Rich Nolan, the National Mining Association’s president and CEO, wrote to the committee on the markup, “these legislative proposals offer urgently needed solutions to the worsening reliability crisis facing our bulk power system.” He added, pointing to projections of demand overwhelming available supply, “the nation cannot afford to lose more dependable, dispatchable generation.”

Illustrating the Point

On both the PJM and MISO grids, the power sources doing the lion’s share of the work this week tell an important story about the irreplaceable role of dispatchable power in periods of peak demand.

Coal, natural gas and nuclear power have stepped up, shouldering the burden of near-record demand while wind power has struggled. And solar power, while helpful at midday, has been of little assistance in the evening as the sun has set and temperatures remain near triple digits.

Wind power’s struggles on the MISO grid during peak demand on June 24^th were alarming. MISO covers parts of 15 states stretching up and down the Midwest, including much of the nation’s prime wind real estate. At 3:30 pm (see the screenshot of the MISO dashboard) of MISO’s 30 gigawatts (GW) of nameplate wind capacity – the amount of power wind generation could provide during ideal conditions – wind provided just 2.8 GW of generation. It was all but a no-show. Of the 111 GW of demand on the MISO grid, wind power met just 2.5% of it.

The Germans have coined the word, “Dunkelflaute”, or dark doldrums, to describe these moments when renewable generation all but disappears from the grid. This disappearing act isn’t a bug of renewable integration, it’s a feature and a reality the Trump administration is actively confronting in its return to pragmatic, reliability-first energy policy.

Without MISO’s coal generation, the Midwest would have been sweltering in the dark. President Trump’s clear-eyed decision to address the grid reliability crisis, urgently refocus U.S. energy policy on dispatchable generation and keep the U.S. coal fleet running might very well have saved lives this summer. It almost certainly will in the years ahead.