OPINION:
A report from the Department of Energy warns of an impending crisis in which deadly, disruptive power failures could become more common nationwide.
America’s power grid, the envy of the world for most of the 20th and early 21st centuries, now faces shortfalls and failures. The problem is twofold. First, demand has increased dramatically because of the rapid rise of data centers and artificial intelligence. Second, policies imposed to fight climate change, including the hasty displacement of reliable power sources by intermittent and unreliable wind and solar power, have undermined grid stability.
Wind and solar must be massively overbuilt, at significant cost and with planned redundancy, to provide even a semblance of steady power flow. Even then, because of the vagaries of weather, they can’t be counted on solely to provide the minimal amount of power necessary to keep the grid functioning. By nature, wind and solar cannot supply baseload power. They also can’t be quickly ramped up to provide on-demand power during peak periods of use. On the other hand, coal, natural gas and nuclear power have the capability to keep the grid running reliably, regardless of weather conditions.
The Department of Energy’s July 2025 annual resource adequacy report starkly contrasts with the previous report, issued under President Biden. Mr. Biden’s report downplayed the Energy Department’s core mission: to encourage electric power adequacy and understand the challenges the nation faces in maintaining reliable, widely available, on-demand electricity.
Instead, as Just the News reports, Mr. Biden’s report mentioned “climate change” 17 times, compared with zero in this year’s report. Although both reports discussed challenges, the Department of Energy’s main challenge under Mr. Biden was transitioning from fossil fuels to “renewable” power sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide during operations. Under President Trump, the current report focuses on ensuring the United States has access to abundant, affordable and reliable power.
Upon the 2025 report’s release, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement that it shows the U.S. electricity grid is on an “unstable and dangerous path” and that “this report affirms what we already know: The United States cannot afford to continue down the unstable and dangerous path of energy subtraction previous leaders pursued, forcing the closure of baseload power sources like coal and natural gas.”
The report’s central message is that the foolhardy displacement of reliable baseload power sources with intermittent weather-dependent sources in the quixotic and exceedingly hubristic quest to control future weather is undermining the U.S. power grid and resulting in more local and regional blackouts. If current trends of displacement by wind, solar and battery backup of coal, nuclear and, to a lesser extent, natural gas and hydropower continue, power failures could increase by 100 times by 2030, the Energy Department warns.
This is not the first time that organizations intimately familiar with supply and demand conditions and the physics of electric power have warned that wind and solar are compromising the grid’s stability. In 2022 and 2023, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials testified before Congress that the “green” transition to supposedly cleaner energy is happening too fast, with the potential for disastrous consequences.
“I think the United States is heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability,” Commissioner Mark Christie told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission oversight hearing in 2023. “The core of the problem is actually very simple. We are retiring dispatchable generating resources at a pace and in an amount that is far too fast and far too great and is threatening our ability to keep the lights on.”
In addition, the two largest Regional Transmission Organizations in the United States, the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator and PJM Interconnection, have each warned in testimonies and publications that the rapid replacement of baseload power generation, primarily fossil fuels and nuclear, with renewables was causing an increase in blackouts and brownouts. This situation has threatened to bring down entire regional grids as more demand is placed on an increasingly tenuous and undependable supply.
The country faces the grim prospect of the types of outages that strike California every summer, which left many Texans without power and dying during the winter in 2021, and that left Spain, Portugal and parts of France without power earlier this summer. When political wishful thinking and virtue signaling replace logic and engineering in the design of power systems, failure is the predictable and often deadly result.
The Trump administration is attempting to right the ship, sharply curtailing support for wind and solar projects, keeping coal plants scheduled for closure online and expediting the approval of reopening nuclear plants. I hope Mr. Trump succeeds, or we face a future huddling in our homes, shivering in the dark in winter and sweltering, without air conditioning or even fans, in the summer. We’ve been there before: in the 1800s. Does anyone really want to return to that?
• H. Sterling Burnett (hsburnett@heartland.org) is the director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.