On his first day in office, President Trump declared an energy emergency and followed it with a flurry of executive orders and appointments to refocus the nation’s energy policy. That focus is shifting to the twin crises of rapidly eroding grid reliability and spiking costs for consumers—and not a moment too soon.

Just this week, amidst bitingly bitter cold, the PJM grid, the nation’s largest, has eclipsed its projected winter peak power demand and issued a “maximum generation event” as it calls on every megawatt of power it can muster to keep the lights on and ship power to neighboring grids facing their own dwindling supplies. The nation is getting just the kind of winter the nation’s grid monitor warned could capsize reliability.

At moments like this, reliable power is everything. President Trump’s new “Unleashing American Energy” executive order correctly states that, “In recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these [energy] resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation, and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens.”

The Biden regulatory wave, which aimed to knock out the coal fleet and make it impossible to build new baseload coal and natural gas generation, put the nation on a collision course with rising power demand and increasingly alarming warnings of eroding grid reliability from the nation’s energy regulators at the North American Electricity Reliability Corp. (NERC) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). But there is reason for hope.

All Eyes on FERC

The newly appointed Chairman of FERC, Mark Christie, has been laser-focused on the grid reliability crisis for years. He now has the chance to address it.

In a statement following his appointment as Chairman, Christie noted that he has “repeatedly warned that America is facing a reliability crisis driven by the dangerous pace of retirements of dispatchable generation units and failure to build sufficient new generation.”

Christie has hammered this crisis even when some of his fellow commissioners have wanted to ignore or dismiss it. In fact, in January of last year, following another blast of cold that pushed grids across the country to the breaking point, Christie underscored the irreplaceable importance of dispatchable power.

Christie pointed out that during periods of peak demand, coal, gas and nuclear power provided 90% of available generation on the PJM grid and were of similar importance on grids across the country. “If the pace of retirements continues at the pace it is, the numbers just aren’t going to add up,” he said. “This is not a commentary against some form of resources. It is simply stating what NERC has been telling us over and over … that if you don’t maintain these dispatchable resources until you have an absolutely adequate replacement, we’re not going to have the success we had in the last three or four days.”

It is fitting that in his first days as Chairman the nation is once again facing a power supply test where dispatchable generation – notably coal and natural gas power – are carrying the lion’s share of the burden. On the PJM grid this morning, January 22, as demand approaches its projected peak, renewable generation is meeting just 3.3% of demand.

The Trump team is finally poised to deliver to Americans the energy policy they want and desperately need. In national polling for the National Mining Association conducted January 14-15, 88% of Americans said they believe the U.S. should utilize a comprehensive energy strategy that includes a diverse mix of fuels including natural gas, coal, renewables and nuclear power, with just 12% disagreeing. And half of Americans (51%) said the Trump administration should withdraw the Biden power plant regulations to allow coal plants to continue operating until sufficient replacement capacity has been built and is brought online; just 25% opposed.

The policies of the previous administration drove the nation’s energy supply to the breaking point. President Trump declared an energy emergency because it is unmistakenly (unmistakably?) here. The essential work to address it now begins.