Wartime Powers Hit U.S. Electric Grid

A yellow triangular warning sign with a lightning bolt on a black background — ELECTRIC GRID SHOCKER

The summer of 2025 turned the U.S. power grid into a stress test lab, and the federal government reached for wartime-style emergency powers to keep the lights — and air conditioners — on.

Story Snapshot

President Trump declared a National Energy Emergency in January 2025, setting the stage for aggressive grid intervention.
The Department of Energy (DOE) used a rarely invoked law, Section 202(c), to force power plants and big energy users to change how they operate during heat waves.
Emergency orders kept coal and oil units running and let utilities exceed pollution limits to prevent blackouts.
Environmental groups say the “emergency” was a cover to extend fossil fuel plants’ lives, sparking a fight over reliability versus pollution.

A heat wave meets a fragile grid

The June 2025 heat wave did not just make people sweat; it pushed the grid close to its limits across the eastern United States.

High temperatures near or above 100 degrees in the Carolinas drove air conditioning demand sharply higher and raised the risk of rolling blackouts.

Duke Energy warned of potential shortfalls in North and South Carolina, and the Department of Energy responded with an emergency order letting Duke run specific power plants at maximum output, even if that meant breaking emissions limits set in their permits.

Federal officials framed the move as simple common sense: when millions of people could lose power in triple-digit heat, keeping the grid stable comes first.

The Energy Department has declared an emergency for the nation’s largest power grid as a massive heat dome threatens electricity demand across areas home to 160 million Americans. pic.twitter.com/tDgmCLRMwp

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 1, 2026

The June Duke order was not a one-off. A report on the Federal Power Act explains that the DOE issued an emergency order that month under Section 202(c) after a utility asked for help ahead of forecast record demand in a heat wave.

Section 202(c), passed almost 90 years ago, allows the federal government to order generators to run during an “emergency” involving the electric grid.

Historically, that meant war or major disasters. In 2025, it meant extreme heat, soaring demand, and concern that planned retirements of older coal and gas units were eroding a safety margin the grid used to enjoy.

From national energy emergency to “Speed to Power”

The aggressive posture in summer 2025 traces back to day one of the Trump administration. On January 20, 2025, President Trump formally declared a National Energy Emergency, saying the country’s “insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation” posed an unusual and extraordinary threat to the economy and national security.

He followed in April with an executive order on “Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid,” which directed DOE to use its powers, including Section 202(c), to keep “critical” generation resources online in at-risk regions.

That April order required DOE to build a uniform national way to judge reserve margins — how much spare capacity the grid has in case something goes wrong.

On July 7, 2025, DOE released its report “Evaluating the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid,” sometimes called the Resource Adequacy Report, introducing that national methodology and warning that rising demand could outstrip supply in several regions.

The report came under the “Speed to Power” initiative, which aims to speed up decisions that affect grid reliability. It highlighted major regional operators like PJM and Midcontinent Independent System Operator as facing systemic reliability challenges if planned plant retirements proceed.

A flurry of emergency orders across regions

Once the energy emergency was in place, DOE began to use Section 202(c) orders more often than in past decades.

In June 2025, DOE issued an emergency order to Duke Energy Carolinas permitting maximum use of specified generating units to avoid blackouts in the Southeast due to “ongoing extreme weather conditions” and shortages of electric energy and generation facilities.

The order explicitly stated that Duke might need to curtail load to maintain grid reliability, signaling how tight the system had become.

The pattern continued. By August 2025, DOE had extended three reliability orders, keeping coal and oil-fired units online at facilities like Puerto Rico’s grid, the Campbell plant, and Eddystone peakers to maintain stability.

In July, Secretary Chris Wright announced a fifth emergency order under Section 202(c) to “safeguard the Mid-Atlantic power grid,” again citing the need to secure reliability during periods of high demand.

Separately, DOE also issued an emergency order to secure the Southeast grid amid surging demand from a heat wave. In each case, the legal hook was the same: a time-limited grid emergency, a specific set of units, and permission to run them harder than environmental rules would normally allow.

How the orders changed who uses power — and how

By 2026, DOE’s use of Section 202(c) expanded beyond just generators to large power users. One detailed account of PJM Interconnection, the Mid-Atlantic grid operator, describes two DOE emergency orders issued June 30, 2026, covering July 1–3.

One order let PJM force data centers and other large customers with at least 50 megawatts of peak demand to switch to backup generators within 15 minutes of an emergency signal, freeing grid capacity for homes and smaller businesses.

A second order let PJM dispatch specific fossil fuel units and granted temporary relief from sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide limits so those plants could run at maximum output. Local coverage emphasized that DOE framed these backup generator orders as a “last resort” before declaring full Energy Emergency Alerts.

These moves show a clear doctrine: when heat pushes demand to the edge, DOE prioritizes reliability for residential and critical customers, even if that means pushing pollution temporarily higher and shifting data centers to diesel generators in the background.

People should not face blackouts in dangerous heat because planners retired too many dependable plants or leaned too hard on intermittent resources without backup. Keeping the grid dependable is a core duty of government, not an optional climate experiment.

Critics raise alarms over “false emergency” claims

Environmental groups see the same facts through a very different lens. Earthjustice, for example, issued a press release in July 2025 accusing DOE of taking “steps to extend the lives of polluting power plants under [a] false energy emergency.”

The group argued that the emergency declarations were not backed by transparent real-time technical data and that DOE was using Section 202(c) as a loophole to bypass environmental protections and delay fossil plant retirements.

Analysts outside government also noted that some 2025 orders reflected “seemingly new interpretations” of Section 202(c), raising questions about precedent and the proper threshold for declaring an emergency.

From a common-sense perspective, those criticisms matter only if DOE truly cannot show hard numbers behind its decisions. If the agency cannot publish clear reserve margin shortfalls, outage risk modeling, and frequency stability data for these events, then claims of an “emergency” become easier to question.

On the other hand, when heat waves are already proven to raise outage frequency and duration across many systems, and blackout-health studies show serious risks during combined heat and grid failure, a cautious government response that leans toward reliability is far more defensible.

A bigger story: an underbuilt grid in a hotter world

The emergency orders of 2025 and 2026 reveal more than one administration’s style; they show a grid caught between old and new worlds. Demand is rising from air conditioning, electric vehicles, and data centers, while many coal and gas plants are scheduled to close and new transmission and firm generation are not coming online fast enough.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation and think tanks warn that several regions face rising risks of shortfalls during extreme weather, even as renewables expand.

Federal officials are trying to bridge that gap with short-term tools: emergency orders, demand response from big users, and temporary pollution waivers. Policy experts argue that these steps treat symptoms, not causes.

For long-term resilience, the country needs faster permitting for new lines and plants, smarter resource adequacy planning, and honest debate about how much dependable capacity must stay online while cleaner options scale.

Until that happens, each new heat wave will test the grid again — and DOE will keep reaching for emergency powers written for another era to hold the system together for one more season.