Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

13Aug

Planned Coal Plant Retirements Crash into Energy Reality

Utilities are grappling with an unshakeable reality: they can’t meet soaring power demand without the existing coal capacity they have. One after another, utilities are dropping plans to close plants or are kicking retirements far down the road. Deliberately removing dispatchable capacity from grids at the same time they are facing record breaking—and growing—electricity demands, […]
30Jul

“It is actually here now”

“The reliability threat is not on the future horizon,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman (FERC) Mark Christie said last week. “It is actually here now.” Christie, who was overseeing his last FERC meeting before departing the commission, was responding to results from PJM’s recent capacity auction—an auction that for the first time came up short […]
24Jul

The AI Power Surge is Here and Coal is Essential to Meeting It

Big tech’s scramble to deploy ever-larger data centers to serve AI has become the electricity elephant in the room. Across the country, power demand is soaring, and data centers with the energy needs of entire cities – and even states – are driving the surge. Meeting this new demand will require new generation but also […]
02Jul

Happy American Energy Independence Day

Energy abundance. Energy security. Energy independence. As we approach July 4th, our Independence Day, it’s worth taking a moment to recognize the leap forward the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) provides to boosting American energy production and reversing the damaging legacy left by the prior administration. In the closing months of the Biden administration, the […]
11Jun

Aligning Energy and Regulatory Policy with the AI Moment

It has become hard to overstate the impact AI and data centers are having on the power sector. This is an industrial revolution on an extraordinary scale. At a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) conference on grid reliability last week, regulators and grid operators once again sounded the alarm over the challenges they collectively face […]
04Jun

Racing to Cover Capacity Shortfalls

Need more evidence we’re in a power supply emergency? Look no further than how the nation’s grid operators are scrambling to fast-track interconnection of new dispatchable resources that can shore up eroding reliability. From the Great Plains to New York, operators are frantically trying to revise interconnection processes to get new generation added to grids […]
28May

A Grid Emergency in MISO

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 […]
21May

A Demand and Price Shock

As electricity prices continue to rise and grid reliability warnings proliferate, electricity demand projections are only growing more aggressive. A new report from consulting group ICF International sees U.S. electricity demand jumping 25% by 2030 and 78% by 2050 compared to 2023. That surge in demand will have huge impacts on already teetering reliability and […]
23Apr

Yes, it is an Energy Supply Emergency

With so much understandable focus on meeting soaring new power demand from the AI revolution and hyperscale data centers, it’s easy to forget the nation entered this moment already facing a grid reliability crisis. The reshoring of industry, electrification and the rapid loss of dispatchable power were already enough to push grid operators to warn […]
19Mar

Undoing the Regulatory Assault on Grid Reliability

Just a week ago the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the “biggest deregulatory action in history,” announcing 31 actions to unleash American energy, lower the cost of living, restore the rule of law and give power back to states to make their own decisions. Notably, on the urgent issue of rapidly eroding grid reliability, the […]