Three weeks ago, something happened that most people missed because nothing dramatic came of it.
On June 30, the U.S. Department of Energy declared a statutory emergency across PJM Interconnection, the largest power grid operator in the country, covering roughly 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C. The Energy Secretary signed two orders under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. They authorized measures normally held in reserve: curtailing large industrial loads with their own backup generation, and letting power plants run past their environmental limits. The orders took effect just before midnight on June 30 and ran through July 3.
The reason was heat. About 160 million people across 30 states were under extreme temperature alerts. Heat indices were forecast near 100 in Chicago and Detroit, 110 in New York City, 112 in Philadelphia, and 113 in Washington. PJM projected a peak demand of over 166,000 megawatts, which would have broken the all-time record set back in 2006.
By July 3, PJM had escalated further, instructing utilities to cut power to customers who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. It was simultaneously dealing with generator outages, overloaded transmission lines, and air conditioning demand that would not let up, in part because the nights were not cooling off enough to give the system a break.
And then it held. There were no widespread rolling blackouts across the region. The grid did what it was supposed to do.
I want to be clear about why I am writing about an event where nothing went catastrophically wrong, because the temptation in this business is to only write about disasters.
A near miss is better information than a disaster. A disaster tells you what happened once. A near miss tells you where the margin actually is. What we learned in early July is that the largest grid in North America, on a hot week, was operating close enough to its limit that federal emergency authority was invoked to keep it there. That is not a prediction of anything. It is a measurement.
This was not a one-off. By most accounting, 2026 has produced a significant multi-state outage event every month so far: winter storms in January and February, a March storm system that cut power to over a million customers in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic with Ohio hardest hit, a tornado outbreak in April, and heat-driven strain in May and June. Roughly 70 percent of outages nationally are triggered by severe weather. The rest are mostly equipment simply failing. Those two causes are related, because a lot of the distribution equipment out there has been in service for a long time.
I am deliberately not going to argue about why. There is a loud national argument happening about generation mix, data center demand, transmission buildout, and who should pay for what. That argument is real and it matters, and it is also entirely outside your control this week. What is inside your control is what happens in your house when the power goes off for eighteen hours in August.
Heat outages are a different animal than winter outages, and most people's plans are built for winter.
Everyone intuitively understands that losing heat in January is dangerous. Fewer people take losing air conditioning as seriously, and that instinct is backwards. Heat is consistently among the deadliest weather hazards in the United States, and it kills quietly, over hours, mostly affecting older adults, people on certain medications, and anyone whose home does not cool off at night.
So here is the shelter-in-place version for heat, which looks different from the winter list:
Pick your cool room in advance. Usually the lowest floor, north or east facing, fewest windows. In an outage you are not cooling the house, you are cooling one room and everyone goes there. Close it off. Block the sun on the windows that get it, from the outside if you can.
Air movement matters more than you think. A battery or USB fan running off a power bank is one of the highest-value items in a heat outage and costs very little. Moving air over damp skin does real work. This is also the single best argument for having a power station rather than only a flashlight.
Water, and more of it than the winter number. The standard planning figure is a gallon per person per day. In sustained heat, plan on more, and remember that a municipal system can be affected by the same event that took your power.
Cooling the body directly. Wet cloths on the neck and wrists, a cool shower if you still have water pressure, damp sheets. Simple and effective.
Know the failure signs. Confusion, stopping sweating, a very rapid pulse, and hot dry skin are not "tough it out" symptoms. That is an emergency call.
Know where you would go. Cooling centers, a library, a relative's house on a different circuit. Deciding at hour ten, in the heat, is a worse decision than deciding now.
Medications and refrigeration. If someone in your house has insulin or another temperature-sensitive medication, that is your first phone call and your first plan, not an afterthought. A cooler and a plan for ice beats improvising.
None of this requires believing anything about the future of the grid. It requires noticing that on an ordinary week in an ordinary summer, the system was operating at the edge of its capacity and needed emergency authority to stay there. That happened. It is on the record.
The good news is that the household answer is small: a fan, a power bank, a cool room chosen in advance, more water than you think, and a plan for whoever in your house is most vulnerable to heat. That is an afternoon of work and it covers the most likely version of the next several summers.
Source verification
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Check them before publishing if you want to be certain nothing has been revised.
- DOE 202(c) emergency declaration for PJM, June 30, 2026: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-06-30/us-issues-emergency-order-for-pjm-interconnection-as-heatwave-looms
- Order details, effective dates, PJM footprint and record peak: https://www.electricchoice.com/blog/pjm-emergency-order-heat-wave-2026/
- 160 million under alerts, heat index figures by city: https://abcnews.com/US/stretched-limit-heat-wave-prompts-us-electrical-grid/story?id=134369230
- July 3 escalation, generator outages and transmission overloading: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/03/power-grid-independence-day-weekend.html
- PJM's own operations updates, including the June 25 Maintenance Outage Recall: https://insidelines.pjm.com/pjm-hot-weather-operations-update-july-1-2026/
- Monthly 2026 outage tally and the 70 percent weather figure: https://electrek.co/2026/07/15/new-normal-the-us-has-suffered-a-major-power-outage-every-month-of-2026/
Two notes. The monthly outage tally is the weakest sourced item, originating from a Reddit post that Electrek then verified item by item; if you want it airtight, cut that paragraph or replace it with the March event alone, which is well documented. And New York is served by NYISO, not PJM, so if you localize this post for an upstate audience, do not imply Nassau was inside the emergency order. The heat was regionwide; the order was not.