A cold blast from Winter Storm Fern swept across much of the PJM power grid this week, exposing reliability challenges as natural gas plants struggled to stay online. On Sunday, PJM reported 21 gigawatts of generation outages, equal to about 16% of afternoon electricity demand.

The outages drove wholesale power prices to between $400 and $700 per megawatt-hour in parts of the region, while prices in Illinois fell below zero because of excess wind generation. Similar disruptions occurred during the 2014 polar vortex and 2022 Winter Storm Elliott, when cold weather also sidelined large amounts of gas-fired generation.

“This is the third major winter storm in a little more than a decade where cold weather has knocked out large amounts of gas-fired generation,” said Lindsey Short, managing director of energy and advocacy services at the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association. “That raises real questions about how the system is being planned to perform in winter conditions.”

PJM issued pre-emergency load management alerts during the storm, but did not declare an emergency event. 1/29/2026