On January 29, 2026, the organization legally responsible for the reliability of the North American power grid published a report saying 13 of its 23 assessment areas are heading into energy shortfalls before 2030.
It’s free. It’s public. It’s a PDF sitting on a website with no paywall and no password.
Nobody read it.
The trade press ran a story. Utility executives skimmed the executive summary. A couple of lobbying groups fired off press releases blaming each other. Within about 72 hours the whole thing was gone from the news cycle.
Meanwhile most survival sites were busy recycling the same EMP article they’ve been running since 2013.
This isn’t a leak. It isn’t classified. It isn’t a theory somebody cooked up on a forum. It’s a federal reliability report that the country’s own grid operators helped write, and it says your lights are on borrowed time.
We read the whole thing. All 23 assessment areas. Every reserve margin table, every probabilistic result, every footnote.
Here’s what’s in it.
140 Million Americans Live in a Grid Region NERC Just Graded as Failing
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation is not a think tank and not an advocacy group. It’s the Electric Reliability Organization for North America, operating under Section 215 of the Federal Power Act, under FERC oversight, covering the continental U.S., Canada, and the northern tip of Baja California.
NERC writes the reliability standards. NERC enforces them. NERC’s own preface puts the number of people depending on the bulk power system at nearly 400 million.
Federal regulation requires them to assess every year whether the grid can meet demand, and report the findings to FERC, the Secretary of Energy, and every Regional Entity. That report is the Long-Term Reliability Assessment, or LTRA.
The 2025 edition came out in January 2026 and covers 2026 through 2035. It opens with a line NERC has never had to write this plainly before: the resource adequacy outlook for the North American grid is worsening.
The Report Leaves Out Every Threat You’re Actually Worried About
Before we get into the regions, you need one sentence from the Considerations section.
NERC does not model cyber or physical security risk in this assessment. Their words, their report.
No terrorism. No coordinated substation attack. No EMP. No Carrington-class solar storm. No sabotage.
Everything in this report is the good-day math. The version where nobody attacks anything and the sun behaves itself.
That’s the version where 13 of 23 regions come up short.
Nobody Explains How NERC Grades a Region, So Here It Is
Reporters see a red map and write “grid at risk.” They never explain the criteria, which is how the industry gets away with waving it off.
NERC uses three tiers, measured across 2026 through 2030.
HIGH RISK means the area blows through at least one of these:
- Annual Loss of Load Hours over 2.4 hours per year, or
- Annual Normalized Expected Unserved Energy over 20 parts per million, or
- The resource adequacy target its own regulator set isn’t met.
ELEVATED RISK means it clears the bar in normal weather, but loss-of-load hours land between 0.1 and 2.4, or unserved energy runs between 2 and 20 ppm, or plausible scenarios of high demand and low resources show the lights going out.
NORMAL RISK means under 0.1 hours, under 2 ppm, targets met with room to spare.
Two acronyms and you can read the whole report. That’s it. That’s the barrier that supposedly kept this off the news.
Winter Storm Uri Is Not NERC’s Worst Case. It’s NERC’s Ruler.
Here’s what “normal risk” actually buys you.
NERC defines the “plausible extreme conditions” a normal-risk area is expected to survive as events similar to Winter Storm Elliott, Winter Storm Uri, and the 2020 Western heat dome.
Uri killed hundreds of people in Texas. Elliott nearly took down the Eastern Interconnection two days before Christmas 2022. The heat dome cooked the Pacific Northwest.
Those are the measuring stick. A gray region on that map isn’t a region that’s safe. It’s a region NERC thinks would probably live through another Uri.
That’s the promise. All of it.
Reserve Margin Is the Grid’s Version of the Debt Clock
There’s a number the industry loves. Anticipated Reserve Margin — how much capacity you have above peak demand. It goes in the press releases. It goes in the rate case. It’s the number on the clock.
And like the debt clock, it tells you almost nothing about what’s coming.
Reserve margin was built for a fleet of coal and gas plants with fuel sitting in a pile in the yard. It answers one question: do you own enough steel? It was never built to answer whether that steel can make electricity at 6:00 p.m. on a windless January morning when the gas contract is interruptible and the solar farm is sitting in the dark.
So NERC now runs probabilistic all-hours modeling next to it, simulating every hour of the year against real weather histories and real forced-outage rates.
Put the two numbers side by side and you find the lie.
WECC-Basin. Its reserve margin never falls below target anywhere in the ten-year window. NERC’s own text says the area shows a substantial surplus. By the scoreboard everybody quotes, the Great Basin is fine.
Same system. Same year. Run the probabilistic model:
| WECC-Basin, 2029 | Result | High-risk threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Expected Unserved Energy | 200,892 MWh | — |
| Normalized EUE | 2,250 ppm | 20 ppm |
| Loss of Load Hours | 310 hours/year | 2.4 hours/year |
That’s 129 times the unserved energy threshold. That’s 310 hours of the lights being off in a region whose paperwork says surplus.
Same story in WECC-Northwest. Reserve margin above target through 2030. The 2029 probabilistic run: 85 hours of loss of load.
Guess which number goes in the annual report.
All 23 Assessment Areas
Every area NERC grades, who it covers, where it lands, and the year it turns. NERC redrew the Western subregion boundaries this year, so WECC-Basin and WECC-Northwest are graded here for the first time.
| Assessment Area | Roughly Who That Is | Risk | When It Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| MISO | 15 states, Manitoba to Louisiana; ~45 million people | 🔴 HIGH | Normal 2026 → Elevated 2027 → High, Winter 2028 |
| PJM | 13 states + D.C., Chicago to Virginia to New Jersey | 🔴 HIGH | Elevated 2026–28 → High 2029 |
| Texas RE-ERCOT | ~90% of Texas load | 🔴 HIGH | Elevated 2026–28 → High 2029 |
| WECC-Basin | Utah, southern Idaho, western Wyoming | 🔴 HIGH | Elevated 2026–28 → High 2029 |
| WECC-Northwest | Pacific Northwest | 🔴 HIGH | Normal 2026–28 → High 2029 |
| MRO-SPP | 14 states, North Dakota to the Texas Panhandle; 18M people | 🟠 Elevated | 2026 |
| NPCC-New York | New York State | 🟠 Elevated | 2026 |
| NPCC-Maritimes | New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, northern Maine | 🟠 Elevated | 2026 |
| MRO-SaskPower | Saskatchewan | 🟠 Elevated | 2026–27, back to Normal 2028 |
| SERC-East | The Carolinas | 🟠 Elevated | Normal 2026 → Elevated 2027 |
| MRO-Manitoba Hydro | Manitoba | 🟠 Elevated | 2029 |
| NPCC-New England | CT, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT; 14.5M customers | 🟠 Elevated | 2029 |
| NPCC-Québec | Québec | 🟠 Elevated | 2029 |
| NPCC-Ontario | Ontario | ⚪ Normal | — |
| SERC-Central | Tennessee Valley region | ⚪ Normal | — |
| SERC-Southeast | Georgia / Alabama region | ⚪ Normal | — |
| SERC-Florida Peninsula | Florida | ⚪ Normal | — |
| WECC-California | California | ⚪ Normal | — |
| WECC-Southwest | Arizona / New Mexico region | ⚪ Normal | — |
| WECC-Rocky Mountain | Colorado / eastern Wyoming region | ⚪ Normal | — |
| WECC-Alberta | Alberta | ⚪ Normal | — |
| WECC-British Columbia | British Columbia | ⚪ Normal | — |
| WECC-Mexico | Northern Baja California | ⚪ Normal | — |
Five red. Eight orange. Ten gray.
If you’re in MISO, PJM, or ERCOT, you’re one of roughly 140 million people inside a region NERC has formally graded as heading for a shortfall inside five years.
MISO Breaks First, and It Breaks in Winter
MISO covers 15 states and about 45 million people. Summer peak demand runs 127 GW in 2026 and climbs to 143.7 GW by 2035. The biggest single driver is 18 GW of data center load.
Meanwhile MISO’s accredited thermal capacity dropped 8.8 GW in one year. MISO also leads every assessment area in projected retiring capacity at roughly 35 GW.
The 2029 probabilistic run comes back at 42.39 ppm and 6.61 loss-of-load hours. Both over the line. NERC’s charts show a 7 GW winter shortfall.
The reserve margin hits 4.3% in 2030 against a target of 8.5%, then goes negative in 2032 and stays there.
MISO’s way out is the ERAS program, which FERC approved too late to be modeled here and could add 20-plus GW of summer capacity by 2030. NERC says so honestly, right in the report.
So the plan is twenty gigawatts of steel, ordered late, arriving on time, in an industry where 390 of roughly 900 transmission projects are already delayed.
PJM Is Retiring Its Own Backup
PJM serves 13 states and D.C. Summer peak grows 56 GW to 210 GW by 2035. Winter grows 62 GW to 198 GW. Its energy growth rate more than doubled in a single year, from 2.3% to 4.8% annually.
The 2026 summer reserve margin already fell from 35.7% to 29.7% in one year.
By 2030 it’s 13.9% against a required 26.3%.
The 2029 probabilistic run: 65.50 ppm, 9.97 loss-of-load hours, 67,581 MWh of unserved energy.
Then there’s the line that should stop you cold. PJM’s maximum total transmission interchange capability is less than 2% of its internal generation capacity.
Sixty-seven million people, and almost nobody to borrow from.
NERC pinpoints where PJM fails: winter, early morning and evening, from equipment freezing and fuel supply problems. That’s Winter Storm Elliott. The one they already had. The one they already studied.
ERCOT’s Plan for 2030 Is Turning the Data Centers Off
ERCOT goes from 94,650 MW summer peak in 2026 to 154,077 MW in 2035. That’s 5.6% a year, every year, for a decade. The driver is 45 GW of large loads by 2030, of which 23 GW are data centers.
And ERCOT’s reserve margin stays above its 13.75% target every single year.
Here’s how. Texas Senate Bill 6, signed in June 2025, gave ERCOT authority to order large loads to curtail during emergencies. So ERCOT’s demand response contribution jumped from a projected 2.7 GW to 13.3 GW for Summer 2026, and to 53.1 GW by 2030.
More than a third of ERCOT’s 2030 peak-shaving strategy is switching off the data centers.
The margin looks healthy because permission to shed load is written into the plan. And it still hits high risk in 2029 at 18.84 ppm and 3.64 loss-of-load hours.
Most of ERCOT’s risk sits in winter. Outside winter it clusters at 9:00 p.m. — solar ramping off while demand stays up. Batteries cover the gap. 18.9 GW by Summer 2026, 25.2 GW by 2029. For four hours.
WECC-Basin Shows a Surplus and 310 Hours of Darkness
Utah, southern Idaho, western Wyoming. Summer demand rises 1.7 GW (17%) over ten years while existing capacity drops 2.3 GW to retirements.
The replacement is 3.5 GW of nameplate solar, worth 2.3 GW at summer peak and roughly nothing after sundown.
You saw the numbers above. By 2029 NERC has the risk periods spreading across every summer month, with risk hours running from midday to nighttime.
The model has Basin importing power from its neighbors to stay up. NERC’s own assessment says sometimes the neighbors don’t have it either.
The Northwest Is Trading 10 Gigawatts for 3
Peak load up 6.6 GW (19%), driven by data centers flooding into the Pacific Northwest. Over 10 GW of new wind, solar and battery nameplate is coming, and it contributes 3.2 GW of on-peak capacity in winter.
Ten gigawatts in. Three gigawatts of winter capability out.
The Northwest peaks in winter. 85 loss-of-load hours by 2029.
The Eight Yellow Regions Nobody Reported On
The elevated areas aren’t filler. Look at what they’re failing at.
MRO-SPP — 14 states. Reserve margins slide from 32.4% to 16.0% across ten years. NERC’s seasonal assessments already found operating-reserve risk during low wind combined with high forced outages.
NPCC-New England — winter peak demand up 7.1 GW, a 36% increase. New England’s interstate gas pipelines already run full on firm heating contracts. In extended cold, generators burn stored liquid fuel, and NERC states plainly that in a long enough freeze the stored fuel runs out.
NPCC-New York — NYISO’s own Q3 2025 report flagged transmission security needs in New York City and Long Island. NERC says demand could run 10–13% above forecast and that New York may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation.
SERC-East — the Carolinas are retiring 5.7 GW of coal and would see shortfalls in below-normal winter temperatures.
MRO-Manitoba Hydro — winter reserve margin collapses from 13.6% to 1.2% in 2030–31 when import contracts expire. The risk driver is extreme drought on a hydro system.
NPCC-Québec — falls below target in 2030–31 and every year after.
NPCC-Maritimes — already below its 20% target in 2026 and 2027.
MRO-SaskPower — risk from planned maintenance outages in spring and fall.
Drought. Frozen gas. Expired contracts. Maintenance windows. Nothing exotic. Nothing hostile. Ordinary weeks on the calendar.
The Same Machine Is Breaking All 23
Strip out the regional detail and here’s what’s actually happening.
Demand is exploding. 224 GW of new summer peak over ten years. Last year’s report said 132 GW. That’s a 69% jump in twelve months. Winter is worse at 245 GW, up 65%. NERC’s quiet note on this: compound annual growth rates for peak demand are now the highest since they started tracking in 1995.
Supply is going the other way. In one year, fossil capacity fell 21 GW while battery, wind and solar rose 23 GW. Coal alone dropped from 180,402 MW to 166,799 MW. Batteries went from 8,587 MW to 23,267 MW.
On a spreadsheet that’s a wash. In January at 6:00 a.m. it isn’t.
Retirements total over 105 GW of peak seasonal capacity, confirmed and announced, over ten years. Certain replacements come to about 60 GW net.
To close that gap, NERC says another 190 GW of Tier 2 resources — 70% of everything sitting in the speculative pile — has to clear interconnection and reach commercial operation. Seventy percent of the maybe pile. On schedule.
The winter problem has a name. NERC’s John Moura used the German word at the briefing: dunkelflaute, the dark windless winter lull. Solar output at winter peak, he noted, is virtually zero at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Four-hour batteries can’t fully recharge during multi-day cold snaps.
The gas problem is worse. 13 of 23 areas are adding gas, with 53 GW of new winter-rated capacity in the queues. But a large share of gas plants run on interruptible fuel contracts, which work fine 360 days a year and are worthless during a deep freeze when every furnace in the state is pulling on the same pipe.
Moura’s comparison should embarrass every regulator in this country. In Canada, 97% of electric generation holds firm gas rights. In the United States, nobody can reliably say who holds firm rights to what.
Transmission is losing the race. A record 41,000 miles of projects are planned, but construction hasn’t moved much, 390 of about 900 projects are delayed, and the lines that let neighbors rescue each other during extreme weather have fallen from 6% to 4% of the portfolio. Only 38 of 863 projects are tie-lines, down from 70 last year.
The one thing that saves a region during a Uri or an Elliott is help from next door. We’re building less of it.
And the grid is losing its spin. NERC certified frequency response as adequate through 2027. That’s the entire certification window. Two years. The Texas Interconnection now runs up to 65.7% non-synchronous penetration at minimum inertia. The Western Interconnection hits 42.9%, or 54.9% once you count rooftop solar.
Moura’s own summary of the mess: we have to accelerate the right resources, not just the megawatts.
Not Everyone Buys It, and We’re Not Going to Hide That
We’re not doing what the mainstream does and burying the counterargument.
In March 2026, Grid Strategies — analysts working for Earthjustice, the NRDC, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund — published a formal rebuttal calling the assessment too pessimistic. Their case is that NERC undercounts generation likely to connect, and that projects already in advanced development would resolve most of the shortfalls.
They’re not crazy. NERC itself admits the data is a July 2025 snapshot, that MISO’s ERAS and PJM’s Reliability Resource Initiative were excluded, and that ERCOT and PJM have both revised near-term load forecasts downward since.
NERC’s answer was that it applied published criteria across all 23 areas using probabilistic studies, deterministic reserve margins and risk scenarios.
Meanwhile America’s Power, the coal coalition, blamed premature coal retirements. Advanced Energy United blamed red tape holding back storage and solar. EPSA blamed market distortion.
Everybody’s got a villain. Everybody’s villain is whoever pays their invoices.
Here’s what all of them quietly agree on, including Grid Strategies, including NERC: the resources aren’t there yet. The only fight is over whose fault that is and how fast somebody fixes it.
You don’t get to sit out the blackout while they finish arguing.
Now Add the Threats NERC Left Out
Go back to that exclusion. No cyber. No physical attack. No terrorism. No EMP. No solar storm. None of it is in this report.
So what happens when you put those threats back in?
That’s the other government report. The one from the President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council, published through DHS, called Surviving a Catastrophic Power Outage. We covered it here: DHS Says Americans Need to Start Prepping for up to Six Months Without Electricity.
Their finding: an outage of at least 2 months, more likely 6 months or more, from physical destruction of transformers and transmission lines, or from a workforce and parts pipeline that can’t recover fast enough. Little to no warning. Cascading failures into water, wastewater, communications, transportation, healthcare and finance.
Their recommendation to the public was fourteen days of supplies.
Two weeks. For a six-month event. In a report that spends its own pages admitting Americans no longer keep enough essentials at home to sustain themselves.
The Air Force’s Air University study running alongside it put replacement time for key grid elements at eighteen months or more.
Stack the two documents. One says the grid runs short of resources by 2029 with nobody attacking anything. The other says an attack on that same grid means six months of darkness and civil unrest starting within hours.
Nobody in Washington has ever put those two pieces of paper on the same desk. We just did.
The Receipts Are Already Coming In
If 2029 sounds like a comfortable distance, look at what happened while you were reading last month’s headlines.
January 2026, Winter Storm Fern. Heavy snow and wind from the southern Appalachians across the Carolinas and southern Virginia. Over a million utility customers lost power on a path running from the Southwest to New England. Parts of Tennessee sat in the dark for the better part of a week.
January 24 through 26, 2026: the Department of Energy issued eight emergency orders under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to ERCOT, PJM, ISO New England, NYISO and Duke Energy. The orders let operators run units past air-quality limits, fire up backup generation at data centers as a last resort before declaring an emergency alert, and in some cases override fuel shortage constraints.
Since May 2025 there have been 27 of these orders.
Emergency authority isn’t a break-glass tool anymore. It’s a monthly operating procedure.
And now it’s in court. Michigan’s Attorney General and environmental groups filed the first-ever judicial challenges to DOE’s use of that authority, over orders that froze 2 GW of coal retirements and ran up more than $80 million in costs at a single facility.
So the grid is being held together by emergency decree, and the emergency decree is getting sued.
Nobody’s coming to save you. They’re too busy suing each other over who gets to keep the plant running.
What You Do About It
Forget the map for a minute. Red region or gray region, the failure modes NERC just documented are the same ones you prepare for. Cold snap. Evening solar cliff. Frozen gas. No neighbor with anything to spare.
1. Find your region and set your clock. MISO, winter 2028. PJM, ERCOT, Basin, Northwest, 2029. New England, Québec, Manitoba, 2029. New York, SPP, Maritimes, already. Gray region? Your threshold is a Uri-class event, and those keep happening. Start with the wider picture in Power Grid Threats: EMPs, Terror Attacks and Grid Failures.
2. Water. Municipal water needs power to treat and pump it. A gallon per person per day is the floor, and you want a system that stores, captures and filters, not a case of bottles in the garage. Start with Emergency Water Storage: Storing Water for Long-Term Preparedness and Urban Survival: Emergency Water Sources. If the storm’s already on the radar and you’ve got nothing, use your bathtub as a backup layer.
3. Food that doesn’t need a working supply chain. Grocery stores run about 72 hours of inventory. Know what actually survives storage: Long-Term Food Storage: What Actually Lasts 25 Years. Then build volume with 60+ Long-Term Survival Foods You Can Buy at the Grocery Store and the best emergency food supplies.
4. Power for the hours the report says you’ll lose. Look at the risk hours: evening solar down-ramp, winter mornings, multi-day cold. That’s your fridge, lights, comms, and anything medical. Cheap Off-Grid Power: Real Solar Setups Under $1,000 and The Best Emergency Solar Generators & Power Packs. Size it for January. Your winter output runs 40–50% of whatever your summer math says.
5. Communications. Cell towers have hours of battery, not days. Communication Infrastructure: Preparing for Chaosand the Ham Radio Cheat Sheet. When the internet goes down with the power, you’d better already own your reference material: Offline Knowledge Hubs: Building Your Own Digital Survival Library.
6. The rest of the stack. What Preparedness Items Should You Stockpile? for the balanced list, and The Aftermath: Preparing for Post-Disaster Problems for what happens after day three, which is the part everyone forgets.
7. Know where you’re standing. NERC’s report is about megawatts. It says nothing about the 30 miles of asphalt between you and the nearest 400,000 people who didn’t prepare. Protecting Yourself from Attacks on Our Power Grid: Urban Centers Will Become Deathtraps.
8. Stop planning to do this alone. Prepper Communities: Building a Survival Network in Troubled Times. PJM can only import 2% of its generation from its neighbors. Don’t make the same mistake PJM did.
9. Prepare for the threats NERC didn’t count. This whole report is the good-day version. Add the part they left out: EMP Preparedness: Preparing for an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.
Read It Yourself
We’re not asking you to take our word for any of this. That’s the whole point.
The 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment is a free public PDF: nerc.com/globalassets/our-work/assessments/nerc_ltra_2025.pdf
Go to the regional dashboards. Find your area. Look at the reserve margin table. Then look at the probabilistic table right underneath it and watch the two numbers call each other liars.
Fifteen minutes. That’s what this cost us.
Fifteen minutes to find out that the people who run your grid have already written down the year it stops working, put their name on it, filed it with the federal government, and gone back to work.
They’re not hiding it. They’re counting on you not to look.
Now you’ve looked. What you do between now and 2029 is on you.
Read the full article here
