October heat triggers federal emergency powers for PJM as forecast reserves tighten

On 12 October the US Department of Energy signed an emergency order for the grid that serves 67 million electricity customers across 13 states and Washington, DC. The reason was in its own paperwork: PJM Interconnection, which operates that grid, forecast demand “at or around 111,500 MW (or higher)” for 13 October, and reported that on the 14th it expected to be “within 900 MW of its reserve margin” — roughly one large power plant — with 61,591 MW of generation expected on outage. Order 202-26-50, signed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, authorises PJM to run named plants beyond their environmental permit limits and, as a last resort, to order data centres and other large customers onto their own backup generators. It took effect on 13 October and runs to the 16th. A PJM spokesperson anticipated no customer impacts, Quartz reported on 14 October. The documents show pressure on the grid during its maintenance season.

What happened

PJM issued a Capacity Advisory for 12–14 October, citing elevated demand, generation outages, transmission outages and firm export obligations. On Sunday the 11th it applied to the Energy Department for emergency powers under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, and recalled every active generation maintenance outage ticket, effective noon on the 14th. On Monday the 12th the department granted the order, and PJM issued a Maximum Generation Alert and a Load Management Alert for the 13th, forecasting loads of 112,447 MW for Tuesday and 112,282 MW for Wednesday. The weather service's Raleigh office listed the daily records in play — 89°F at Raleigh on the 13th, 90°F at Fayetteville on the 14th — and Bloomberg, via Quartz, reported forecasts more than 25°F above seasonal norms, pushing highs toward 90°F in Washington by midweek.

Tuesday the 13th was hot, and the market said so. PJM's actual peak was about 108 GW — far below the 162 GW summer peak of 2 July — yet real-time prices at its Western Hub traded above $1,500/MWh, because 46 GW of planned outages (60 GW in total) had shrunk the pool of plants to serve it, Yes Energy calculated. Its measure of combined stress — demand net of wind and solar, plus plants on outage — was forecast at 167 GW of “effective load”, the 12th-highest in PJM since 2016. PJM called a Pre-Emergency Load Management Action for the 13th and 14th, paying demand-response customers to cut use at its direction. The neighbouring Midcontinent ISO declared conservative operations the same day, its own effective load at 135 GW, past the recent record of 133 GW set in August 2023 and prices near $1,000/MWh — limiting imports PJM could call on.

On Wednesday the 14th PJM extended the alert, after generation outages ran at about 61,000 MW on the Tuesday, and with the Wednesday forecast raised to 113,312 MW — about 28 per cent above the mid-October average of 2019–21, Realtor.com News reckoned. A PJM spokesperson said no customer impacts were anticipated, via Newsweek, and no rolling blackouts were announced. By PJM's own account it never reached the last resort: as of its 13 October update, revised on the 14th, it had “not had to make use of Large Load backup generation to date”. In its 14 October operations update, PJM said it had, the order still ran to the 16th, and the weather service's forecast discussion had a cold front arriving, with weekend highs 6–10°F below average. The heat that caused this is forecast to break. The conditions that made it dangerous are not.

The numbers

The key figures: a forecast reserve-margin cushion of 900 MW on 14 October — the Pennsylvania Capital-Star's translation is “roughly the equivalent of a single large power plant”; anticipated generation outages of 61,591 MW that day; and more than 35 GW of unused backup generation nationwide, by the Energy Department's own estimate. The backdrop comes from the EIA's October Short-Term Energy Outlook: US electricity consumption of 4,195 billion kWh last year, rising to 4,288 billion this year and 4,356 billion in 2027, with commercial demand — which includes data centres — forecast by EIA to grow 2.8 per cent year-over-year in 2027; wholesale prices in PJM forecast up 41 per cent this year, the largest rise of any region, against a national average of $52/MWh, itself 11 per cent up.

The squeeze is already on the bill. Households in Washington, DC saw utility rates rise 7 per cent at the start of July, per the city's Public Service Commission, and PJM's market monitor recorded average peak consumption up 2.2 per cent in the first seven months of 2026, the Washington Informer reported. September was the warmest in the United States since records began in 1895, at 69.4°F. The July auction that buys PJM's standby capacity fell 6,800 MW short; when PJM reopened its interconnection queue in April after four years closed, 811 projects totalling 220,000 MW asked in, the Capital-Star reported.

What the region is saying

Washington framed the order as both necessity and political argument. “This order will help ensure millions of American families and businesses across the mid-Atlantic have access to affordable, reliable, and secure electricity by making additional power generation, including backup power, available to use as needed,” Secretary Wright said in the department's announcement on the 12th, adding: “While past leaders’ energy subtraction policies have made the grid more vulnerable to the risk of blackouts when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, this administration remains committed to using every available tool to prevent blackouts.” Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich went further in a statement to Fox News Digital on the 13th: “The Trump Administration is implementing energy addition policies and reversing the dangerous energy subtraction policies it inherited that have made electricity more expensive and the grid less reliable. We remain focused on lowering prices by unleashing affordable and reliable American energy that works whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining,” he said.

The operator's account is less partisan and, in the long run, more sobering. “Unseasonable weather patterns are providing fewer days to perform important maintenance or construction on the generation and transmission equipment serving our footprint,” Mike Bryson, PJM's senior vice-president for system operations, said in the company's 13 October update. Its procedures, along with the DOE orders, gave it additional tools to maintain reserve margins, the update added. Paul Dajewski, PJM's senior manager for dispatch, put the bind plainly in PJM's September review: “Ultimately, we have to take these transmission and generation outages, and we can’t simply defer them indefinitely,” he said. Equipment has to be maintained sometime — and the windows for doing it are closing.

Regional advocates read the same events as consequences of choice. “What's usually a routine maintenance season is now an emergency,” Jon Gordon of the renewables group Advanced Energy United told the Capital-Star on the 13th — a sign, he said, of tightening supply on the PJM grid. David Masur of PennEnvironment was blunter: “This is emblematic of the old adage, "You make your bed and then you lie in it,”” And Calvin Butler, chief executive of Exelon — whose BGE and PEPCO zones were among the order's most stressed — was quoted by the Washington Informer from a Washington conference on 17 September: “In PJM, the market that we’re in, we are generation short; We have a lack of supply, and anytime you have a high demand, prices go up,” he said. Utilities, he argued, should be allowed back into generation to drive down these costs.

September showed this already

This was not the grid's first emergency of the year, or even of the season. PJM's review of September records an early-September peak of about 152,800 MW on 1 September, with outages at 8.47 per cent of capacity on 31 August, and a 17 September peak just shy of 127,000 MW with 20.7 per cent of capacity out the next day — exports to hotter southern grids adding strain both times. Federal orders covered 1–8 and 17–18 September, and the department's list of 2026 emergency orders, numbered up to 202-26-50, includes fifteen for January's Winter Storm Fern, a May backup-generation authorisation, and single-plant orders keeping named units online across the country, several running into December. Behind it sits an old fleet: 37 per cent of PJM's capacity at the end of 2025 came from units more than 40 years old, and ageing infrastructure drove 53 per cent of new line-related transmission projects, Realtor.com News reported, citing the market monitor and FERC.

What it means for energy, water and industry

For business readers, three consequences. First, if you are siting a data centre or energy-hungry factory in PJM territory, treat capacity scarcity as a year-round planning assumption: federal emergency orders touched this grid in January, February, May, June, July, August, September and October. The order's Exhibit A names who gets called — gas units in Pennsylvania and Illinois, oil units in Virginia and North Carolina, the Mount Storm coal station in West Virginia — and registered diesel backup engines at a mushroom farm, a university medical centre, an Illinois village and a township water authority, flagged as emergency engines whose demand-response operation is disallowed. Second, if you buy power, the price signal has arrived: wholesale prices up 41 per cent this year, spikes above $1,500/MWh in a week when demand never approached the summer record, and demand-response programmes that delivered only about 67 per cent of promised cuts last summer — useful, but not a power plant.

For water and the public sector, a sharper point. The order explicitly spares critical facilities — hospitals, water treatment and wastewater plants, 911 centres — from being ordered onto backup power: their generators exist for their own resilience. Center Township Water Authority's diesel engines appear in the exhibit as emergency engines whose demand-response operation is explicitly disallowed. And the environmental trade is explicit in the order's text: dispatched units may exceed permit limits for sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, ammonia, wastewater release and fuel throughput, and those emissions will not count toward rolling-average limits — a legally careful, quietly radical arrangement.

What to watch

**16 October**, when the order expires; any renewal must be requested before it lapses. **This weekend**, when the cold front arrives: the weather service has weekend highs 6–10°F below average. **PJM's daily notifications** to the department naming every unit run under the order's allowances — whether the powers were actually used. **17 and 20 November**, when the Wagner and Eddystone orders expire; **11, 18 and 25 December**, for Centralia, for Culley and Schahfer, and for Craig. **The next capacity auction** after July's 6,800 MW shortfall, and the 811 projects now in the reopened queue. **And winter**: EIA expects households heating with gas or propane to spend less this winter, those heating with electricity or oil more — heating oil about 21 per cent more.

Our reading

Our reading, labelled as such: what made last week unusual was a forecast, not a measured event — an order sought and granted over a margin that existed on paper. The forces behind that forecast look structural, not seasonal. Demand growth led by data centres, with national consumption forecast to rise and commercial use forecast to rise 2.8 per cent in 2027; an ageing fleet, with 37 per cent of capacity over 40 years old; and a shrinking maintenance calendar as hot weather stretches into both shoulders of the year — each is documented above; together they offer the likeliest explanation of the federal emergency. The order that managed it is a bridge, not a fix: every named resource in it is existing fossil capacity, much of it old, some ordinarily constrained by environmental permits for exactly the hours it was needed.

What we could not verify matters too. Whether any plant ran above its permit or any data centre switched to its diesels will only appear in the daily notifications PJM owes the department; its last public update, revised on the 14th, said large-load backup had not been used “to date”. The 900 MW figure is an 11 October forecast, not a measured 14 October actual; we found no published actual for that day's margin. The causes remain contested — the department blames “energy subtraction”, advocates blame queue management and fossil preference — and the data that would settle it is not yet public. Readers planning capacity in North America should assume this toolkit returns, and price the risk of finding themselves on its Exhibit A.

By The Stratawire newsroom.