Dep't of Energy says continuing Biden-era energy policies will increase blackout risk by 100-fold

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released its annual “Resource Adequacy Report,” earlier this month, and it warns that blackouts are coming if the country carries out the Biden-era plan to retire fossil fuel power plants. That is not sitting well with climate activists. 

The report's executive summary opens with a declaration that the U.S. possesses “abundant energy sources and capabilities such as oil and gas, coal, and nuclear.” It warns that the speed at which utilities are retiring fossil fuel-powered generators and replacing them with unreliable and intermittent wind and solar power threatens to increase the risk of power outages by 100X in 2030. 

“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,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. 

The Biden-Harris administration’s report in April 2024 under then-Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm took on a noticeably different tone. Their executive summary warned that relying on fossil fuel resources to meet reliability requirements is “risky,” and natural gas generators should be replaced with hydrogen or fitted with carbon capture, a technology DOE engineers warned wasn’t affordable or scalable. Granholm’s report mentioned climate change 14 times, but the Trump administration’s report doesn’t mention it at all.

Bright contrast between the two reports

Both reports recognize that the growing energy demands of data centers and power plant retirements are diminishing the nation's energy resource adequacy, but the 2024 report was focused more on emissions reductions than energy abundance. Climate activists have been quick to trash the Trump administration’s report. 

“The Trump administration has made clear it intends to use the authority of the federal government to prevent fossil-fueled power plants from closing,” Canary Media reported. 

The article complains that the 2025 report doesn’t consider any combination of solar, wind and batteries to be reliable resources, and it quotes purported experts saying the report overestimates the number of power plants that will close by 2030.

“I take exception to the idea that the DOE cherry-picked worst-case assumptions for coal plant closures because these announced plant retirements rely on state-level Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) planning documents, public utility commission filings or utility announcements,” Issac Orr, co-founder and vice president for Always On Energy Research, told Just the News. 

800 hours of blackouts per year by 2030

Writing about the report on their “Energy Bad Boys” Substack, Orr and Mitch Rolling, the co-founder and director of research for Always On, explained that the 2025 report examines future grid reliability using multiple scenarios in several regions of the U.S. under Biden's retirement of fossil-fuel powered energy plants.

One scenario assumes that all power plants that have announced an intention to retire will close, which will reduce power capacity in the U.S. by 104,000 megawatts. Based on data compiled by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the report estimates that 209,000 megawatts of capacity will come online by 2030. Of the 209,000 megawatts of new capacity coming online, approximately 20,000 megawatts will be natural gas-fired capacity. The rest is intermittent wind and solar, backed up by 4-hour battery storage.

The report also looks at resource adequacy under a second scenario that assumes all the power plants planned for retirement will stay online, and the 209,000 megawatts of capacity will come online as planned. 

Under the plant closure scenario, according to the report, the average duration of electricity outages — measured in loss of load hours (LOLH) — will go from 8.1 hours per year under the current system to 817 hours per year by 2030. Under inclement weather, LOLH could increase to 1,316 hours. 

Blackouts can be costly and even deadly. The impact on the GDP of the Spanish blackouts in April, according to The Brussels Times, cost that nation approximately $464 million, in addition to at least seven deaths. Orr and Rolling calculated the cost of a blackout impacting a single Colorado grocery store in April 2024 to be over $12,000 per megawatt hour. 

The areas of the country most at risk for outages, according to the DOE report, are the north-central part of the country in the Upper Great Plains, and areas of Maryland and Virginia surrounding Washington, D.C. The Texas grid would also see an elevated risk, as would Michigan and parts of the Midwest. 

Under the no-plant closure model, the report still estimates that the north-central area of the U.S., Texas and the areas around D.C. would see an increased duration of outages, but not nearly as severe as the effects of the plant closure scenario. 

The report also contains a “required build” scenario, which is a “perfect capacity” scenario in which outages are very rare. Under that scenario, no plants would face closure, and grid operators would add another 12,500 megawatts of new generating capacity. 

Dark money funding climate activism disguised as reporting

Canary Media claimed that the most recent DOE report is “flawed” and intended to help the Trump administration bolster the use of fossil fuels. 

Canary Media was founded by Rocky Mountain Institute, an anti-fossil fuel nonprofit advocacy group for the wind and solar industry. Canary Media’s funders include a number of anti-fossil fuel organizations, including the Climate Imperative Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the U.S. Energy Foundation. The Rocky Mountain Institute, MacArthur Foundation and Climate Imperative Foundation have all received funding from Energy Foundation China, which has links to the Chinese Communist Party, according to State Armor, a non-profit organization that focuses on state solutions to global security threats.

Canary, along with E&E News, were two of the few media outlets that covered the latest report’s findings. Like Canary, E&E also quoted pro-renewable experts criticizing the report’s estimation of plant closures and the inadequacy of renewable energy to secure grid reliability. 

Among the experts the Canary Media article quotes is Greg Wannier, senior attorney for the Sierra Club, who points out that many plant closures are being delayed as a result of load growth projections. The Sierra Club opposes delays of such closures. 

“It's also amusing that the Sierra Club complained about DOE not including the announced plant capacity in its reliability modeling while simultaneously arguing those plants should still close down,” Orr with Always On Energy said. 

He said that the sources the report uses to determine which plants are likely to close produce reasonable assumptions. The closure plans in Integrated Resource Plans (IRP) that the report utilizes, Orr explained, have a high likelihood of happening. Utilities use these plans to predict future energy needs. 

New capacity additions may be higher than estimated

The Canary Media article also criticized the DOE report for not including new generation capacity planned to be added between 2027 and 2030. For the 209,000 megawatts of projected capacity additions, the DOE report relies on Tier 1 projects, which are those with a high degree of certainty to be built. They’re a close equivalent to “shovel ready projects.” 

Orr agreed that, for the short term, this was a good choice. However, he said, for modeling after 2026, it might have been better to include some of the Tier 2 projects. 

“I think that virtually everyone can agree that the three different scenarios — the plant closures, no plant closures, and required build — are meant to demonstrate the value of keeping existing dispatchable capacity online by showing that there are barely any blackouts in that scenario,” Orr said.