WASHINGTON — For two afternoons this week, the grid operator for 13 states and the District of Columbia paid customers to use less electricity, while keeping in reserve a federal order that would let it push data centers onto their own generators.
PJM Interconnection says it did not need that power. It called demand response, the programs that pay homes and factories in advance to cut their use, on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, but said its alerts required no action from customers. It is the same grid that hit a power grid emergency on July 4.
What made this week unusual is that the weather was warm, not extreme. Autumn is when generator and transmission owners take equipment offline for repairs and construction, and the warmth left little room to do it. PJM’s Mike Bryson, a senior vice president for system operations, said “unseasonable weather patterns” are providing “fewer days to perform important maintenance or construction” on the equipment that serves the region.
The margins were thin by PJM’s own count. PJM said generation outages ran at about 61,000 MW on Tuesday, with a recall of all active generation maintenance tickets effective at noon Wednesday. In its application to the Energy Department, quoted in the department’s order, PJM said it was forecast to be “within 900 MW of its reserve margin on October 14, 2026.” That is a forecast, not a measured shortfall, and the figures come from PJM; the posted documents carry no independent tally.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed the order Monday, and framed it in terms of policy. “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,” he said in a department statement. PJM’s own account points to planned outages and warm weather, and says the outages spanned nuclear, coal, gas, wind, solar and hydro plants, with about 15,000 MW of them unplanned, according to its preliminary data.
Demand is the longer story. PJM says about 11,000 MW of data center load is already on its system, and that the consumption of such customers “does not fluctuate significantly with the weather.” Synapse Energy Economics found, as TEH reported in June, that Pennsylvania electric bills are up more than 50 percent since 2020, with data centers the main reason. Demand response, once rare, has been called on 15 days across 2025 and 2026, PJM says, against eight days from 2015 through 2024.
The order runs through Friday. It requires PJM to report to the department each day which plants and backup generators it designated to use the order’s allowances, and the list of eligible plants was on its fourth version by Wednesday. None of the documents posted so far shows which plants actually ran past their limits, or what they emitted.
