67 Million Americans Are Under a Power Grid Emergency: What This Means for Homeowners

An October heat spell has pushed North America’s largest power grid into emergency operations as near-record warmth coincides with one of the busiest periods of the year for grid repairs.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued the directive on Monday at the request of PJM Interconnection, which coordinates electricity for more than 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, DC.

“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,” Wright said in a statement announcing the order, which runs Oct. 13–16.

What the emergency means for homeowners

Despite the emergency designation, PJM hasn’t asked the general public to reduce electricity use, and rolling blackouts are not imminent.

Instead, it's called on customers enrolled in demand-response programs to cut power. These customers agree ahead of time to reduce electricity use when the grid is strained in exchange for payments or other incentives.

But they’re not foolproof: During six dispatches in summer 2025, participating resources delivered about 67% of the electricity reductions they had committed to provide, according to PJM.

The emergency order also gives PJM more flexibility to increase supply before outages become necessary. Operators can bring generators back from maintenance, call additional power plants online, and, if conditions worsen, direct some large electricity users with onsite generators—including data centers—to temporarily run on backup power.

Deliberately cutting power to customers comes much later, but it’s not without precedent.

In August of last year, equipment failures knocked a substation near Baltimore offline and threatened cascading outages. When initial measures—like calling on demand response and returning generators from maintenance—weren’t enough, operators cut about 20 megawatts of electricity to roughly 4,000 customers in Howard County for 28 minutes.

ReliabilityFirst later concluded that the controlled outage helped prevent the potential uncontrolled loss of more than 1,500 MW across the Baltimore area.

The shrinking window for grid repairs

What's unusual about this emergency order is that fall is typically when utilities have room to take large amounts of equipment offline.

Under normal weather patterns, electricity use falls after summer, creating a window to repair power plants, replace equipment, and complete transmission projects before winter demand picks up.

October is traditionally one of the busiest months for that work: PJM has historically seen more than 50,000 MW of generating capacity offline during peak maintenance periods, along with roughly 2,400 planned transmission outages in October.

But this week shows what happens when that window coincides with unseasonably warm weather.

PJM expected demand to near 114,000 MW on Wednesday—about 28% above the average for Oct. 14 from 2019 through 2021, but still well below the roughly 153,000 MW the grid served during the early-September heat wave. That’s nearly 27,700 MW more generation unavailable this time around, even though demand is lower.

The bigger problem is how much less equipment PJM has available to meet it.

PJM told the Energy Department that power plants capable of producing as much as 61,591 MW could be unavailable on Wednesday. During another grid emergency on Sept. 17, about 33,899 MW were unavailable.

That leaves far less room for something else to go wrong. PJM told the Energy Department it was forecast to come within just 900 MW of its reserve margin on Wednesday.

“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 senior vice president for system operations, said on Tuesday.

PJM has recalled or canceled maintenance outages where possible this week, including recalling active generation-maintenance outages beginning on Wednesday afternoon.

But postponing the work only shifts it to another day.

“Ultimately, we have to take these transmission and generation outages, and we can’t simply defer them indefinitely,” Paul Dajewski, PJM senior manager for dispatch, said this month.

And there's plenty of work that has to be done. A 2025 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission analysis found aging infrastructure was a driver behind 53% of new line-related transmission projects in PJM. The grid’s independent market monitor separately found that 37% of PJM’s installed generating capacity at the end of 2025 came from units more than 40 years old.

The pressure is growing fastest in data center country

That longer-term pressure is particularly visible in Virginia, one of the areas where PJM says supplies are tight this week and the center of the nation’s data center boom.

The Old Dominion had an estimated 13,300 MW of large-data-center power capacity as of mid-2026—roughly one-fifth of the projected U.S. total, according to a Realtor.com® analysis of facility-level data from Aterio.

And the actual demand they're already exerting is substantial. Data centers accounted for about 3,600 MW of electricity demand in Dominion’s territory by the end of 2024, after their consumption increased 660% from 2013.

A transmission fault in Northern Virginia in July showed what that concentration can mean for the grid. Nearly 3,800 MW of data center demand abruptly switched to backup generators—the largest large-load transfer PJM has ever recorded—forcing operators to rapidly reduce generation as electricity demand plunged.

Of course, data centers didn't cause this week’s heat or maintenance outages. But they are raising the amount of electricity PJM must be prepared to supply before either problem occurs.

“While we expect to operate reliably this summer, the outlook resembles last year’s and reflects a new reality—continued load growth driven by data centers that is outpacing the addition of new generation,” Bryson said in May. “This results in tightening operating reserve margins and greater risk.”