House subcommittee hears unified warning: ‘Less supply, more demand’ creates reliability risk
Get AI-powered insights, summaries, and transcripts
Subscribe
Summary
Regional grid operators told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee that retiring dispatchable generation, record demand growth (driven by data centers and manufacturing), and interconnection/permitting delays together create a credible risk of power shortfalls without swift, coordinated action.
House Energy and Commerce subcommittee members and the leaders of the nation's regional grid operators on Friday framed the country's electricity system as facing a near‑term reliability challenge driven by retiring dispatchable power and rapidly rising demand.
The hearing began with Chairman Bob Latta's opening that the nation “is in the midst of a reliability crisis,” and was followed by a string of testimony from the regional operators that reinforced the point. “Less supply, more demand. It adds up to increased reliability risk and higher prices,” Manu Ashtana, president and CEO of PJM Interconnection LLC, told the panel.
Why it matters: Witnesses from PJM, ISO New England, MISO, NYISO, SPP, CAISO and ERCOT said the same combination of factors — large retirements of coal and other baseload plants, interconnection queues dominated by intermittent resources, and surging demand from data centers and manufacturing — is creating pressure on reserve margins across much of the country. Nearly every operator urged a mix of near‑term steps (slow retirements, speed interconnection, use existing assets) and longer‑term fixes (transmission expansion, permitting reform, more dispatchable supply).
Most operators described concrete near‑term actions. PJM reported reforms that cut its interconnection queue from nearly 200,000 MW to about 67,000 MW and said new windows and rule changes are moving projects forward. MISO said it has approved about $30 billion in regional transmission lines and is seeking FERC approval for an expedited resource addition study. CAISO pointed to FERC‑approved queue reforms that reduced clogging in its studies. ERCOT detailed weatherization inspections and a growing role for battery storage while noting natural gas, coal and nuclear still supplied a majority of delivered energy in 2024.
Several witnesses stressed that market signals alone cannot prevent retirements when state or federal policies remove a plant's legal ability to operate. Ashtana warned that markets “cannot build what governments do not let them build,” urging coordinated policy and regulatory approaches.
Members on both sides flagged related concerns: some Republicans emphasized the need to preserve and add dispatchable resources to compete with China’s AI push, while Democrats pointed to the importance of the Inflation Reduction Act and federal grid funding for making many projects financially viable. Multiple operators said a stable, well‑staffed FERC is critical.
Looking ahead: Operators agreed on the need for an all‑of‑the‑above approach tailored regionally — keeping existing dispatchable capacity available, speeding interconnection and permitting, expanding long‑distance transmission, and incentivizing resources that can perform during extreme weather. But they cautioned that building generation and transmission takes years, underscoring the urgency of near‑term steps.