- If power plants continue being closed and replaced mostly with unreliable wind and solar resources as planned, America’s power grids face a hundredfold increase in the risk of blackouts by 2030, according to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report
- The risk is 27 times greater for the Carolinas, given current plans
- Fortunately, the new state law repealing the Carbon Plan’s interim goal for emissions reductions should let policymakers make better resource choices
America’s power grids are increasingly at risk, hobbled by power plant closings, unreliable and insufficient replacements, and increased demand for new power. “If these shadows remain unaltered by the future,” as Charles Dickens put it, then by 2030 the nation’s risk of blackouts will be 100 times worse.
That is the distressing finding from a recent Resource Adequacy Report from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), “Evaluating the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid.”
According to the report, what is endangering reliable energy across America is “the accelerated retirement of existing generation capacity and the insufficient pace of firm, dispatchable generation additions (partly due to a recent focus on intermittent rather than dispatchable sources of energy).” This “status quo” is unsustainable, the report finds, given the expected load growth by 2030, driven especially by “manufacturing, re-industrialization, and data centers driving artificial intelligence (AI) innovation.”
The report notes that there are 104 gigawatts (GW) of planned capacity retirements by 2030, which would be replaced by 209 GW of new generation. That would seem to be more than enough, except for one major problem: Only 22 GW of this new generation would come from “firm baseload generation resources” — i.e., coal, natural gas, or nuclear, as opposed to intermittent solar and wind resources.
The report noted:
This [104 GW] capacity is not being replaced on a one-to-one basis[,] and losing this generation could lead to significant outages when weather conditions do not accommodate wind and solar generation. … [Estimated] annual loss of load hours (LOLH) increased by a factor of a hundred. [Note: Loss of load hours is “the expected duration of power outages when a system’s load exceeds its available generation capacity.”]
By way of comparison, by 2034 the most recent Carbon Plan for North Carolina would have seen 6.2 GW of retirements (coal), while adding 12.8 GW of new renewable capacity: 7.7 GW of solar, 1.2 GW of onshore wind, and 2.2 GW of battery backup, plus 1.7 GW of pumped hydro. On the other hand, it would have added only 3.8 GW of new, one-to-one replacement generation: 2.4 GW of natural gas combined-cycle generation, 1.1 GW of natural gas combustion turbine “peaker” generation, and only 0.3 GW of nuclear generation.
Nevertheless, the recent passage of Senate Bill (SB) 266, “The Power Bill Reduction Act,” which eliminated the Carbon Plan’s interim goal of a 70 percent reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from electricity generation resources, should result in an updated Cabon Plan with a better, more reliable mix of generation resources.
Evaluating future grid reliability under different resource scenarios
The DOE report developed resource adequacy methodology encompassing electricity supply and new load growth that was “derived from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Interregional Transfer Capability Study (ITCS) which leverages time-correlated generation and outages based on actual historic data.” It generated a two-part reliability standard regarding duration of outages (no more than 2.4 hours of lost load in a given year) and magnitude of outages (unserved load cannot exceed 0.002 percent of the total energy demanded in a given year).
It then evaluated three separate scenarios for 2030 against the current system: “Plant Closures” (essentially the status quo scenario with all announced power plant retirements and power plant additions taking place), “No Plant Closures” (no retirements, but announced additions), and “Required Build” (announced retirements along with however many more additions would suffice to maintain the current level of grid reliability). These scenarios were evaluated against “simulations using 12 different years of historical weather,” with every hour “based on actual data for wind, solar, load, and thermal availability [i.e., natural gas, nuclear, and coal].”
Status quo in the Carolinas: Blackout risk 27 times worse by 2030
With respect to North Carolina, the report found that the SERC-East subregion (i.e., North and South Carolina) “particularly … faced emerging winter reliability risks,” especially under the “Plant Closures” scenario. That finding means that, by 2030, the planned additional power plants in the Carolinas won’t be sufficient or reliable enough to make up for all the planned power plant closures.
The blackout risk will be 27 times worse under the “Plant Closures” (status quo) scenario, four times worse under “No Plant Closures,” and less than three times worse under “Required Build.” Under the status quo, the unserved load would quickly worsen, going well outside (more than double) the reliability standard. It would stay safely within the reliability standard in the “No Plant Closures” and “Required Build” scenarios.
The “Required Build” scenario would necessitate an additional 500 megawatts (MW) of capacity (on top of the planned new capacity) by 2030 to uphold the reliability standards.
Why this risk is lessened by the repeal of the Carbon Plan’s interim goal
This report underscores the importance of SB 266’s repeal of the Carbon Plan’s interim goal. Having that goal in place required the accelerated retirement of North Carolina’s coal-fired power plants. North Carolina’s more than 9 GW of coal capacity represents roughly one-fourth of the state’s installed capacity. Coal’s ongoing importance to the grid was highlighted during a recent heat wave, when Duke Energy Carolinas received emergency authorization from the DOE to exceed environmental emissions levels, increased coal generation by 30 percent, and thereby avoided power outages.
The interim goal had also caused Carbon Plan modeling largely to exclude natural gas–fired power plants and instead to rely on overbuilding intermittent solar and wind with battery backup (see the discussion above). A March 11, 2025, meeting of the state Senate Committee on Agriculture, Energy, and the Environment, received information from the Public Staff of the North Carolina Utilities Commission regarding the extent of this influence. It showed that modeling without the interim goal would save electricity consumers $13 billion.
Refocusing the planned future resource mix back to least-cost and reliable sources should avoid some of this increased blackout risk. Being able to delay coal plant closures till reliable, one-to-one replacement generation is in place would eliminate even more risk.
