Wright's order opens PJM emergency window through September 8

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright signed an emergency order on 1 September authorising PJM Interconnection to run a named list of power plants past their environmental operating limits and, at the last step before firm load-shedding, to fall back on diesel and other backup generation. Order No. 202-26-41 took effect on issuance and expires at 11:59 PM EDT on 8 September, according to the order as published by the Department of Energy. It is a Section 202(c) directive under the Federal Power Act, the statute that lets the Secretary override the ordinary permit and dispatch rules when he finds an emergency.

The finding is his to make. In the order Wright determines "that a statutory emergency exists in the PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. (PJM) Region, due to a sudden increase in demand, a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electric energy, and other causes." Operative paragraph A directs PJM to dispatch the units listed in Exhibit A "only as needed to maintain reliability." Paragraph B authorises PJM to direct backup generation, whether auxiliary, standby, battery storage or diesel, "to operate as a last resort before declaring an EEA 3 (i.e., before firm load interruption) or during an EEA 3."

That sequencing is the whole story, and it is easy to misread. The order is a standing authorisation, not evidence that any of it has fired.

What triggered the order, and what did not

The grid condition PJM described when it asked for relief was not a blackout. In its 1 September application, signed by executive Michael Bryson, PJM said it had declared an Energy Emergency Alert Level 1, the first rung, citing elevated demand, generation outages and firm exports. It forecast demand "at or around 152,000 MW (or higher)" and anticipated generation outages "around 15,000 MW." Those are PJM's own figures in its own filing, not independently measured reserves, and an EEA 1 sits several steps below the EEA 3 threshold that unlocks backup diesel under the order.

So the order authorises a last resort against a condition that, at request time, was not close to it. The Reuters wire carried by the Guardian framed the same action as a blackout-risk mitigation for a grid serving 67 million people from Washington to Chicago, and repeats the Secretary's authorisation of backup generation "as a last resort before declaring a level three energy emergency alert." What neither the wire nor the DOE newsroom establishes is that any Specified Resource ran past its limits, or that a single backup generator started. The order is the event. The dispatch is a permission that may never be exercised.

The environmental waiver is the mechanism worth reading

The part of the order with teeth is the suspension of permit limits. The document states that PJM anticipates its dispatch may exceed restrictions on sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, wastewater release and other limits including ammonia and fuel throughput, and that emissions, hours of operation and fuel burned by Specified Resources and backup generation while the order is in effect "will not be counted toward applicable rolling average-based limitations." That last clause traces to a DOE rehearing order dated 4 February 2026, cited inside 202-26-41, which established the non-counting rule that this window now invokes.

This is where reliability and air quality collide by design. A rolling-average permit limit is the enforcement instrument that keeps a plant's emissions inside its allowance over time; suspend the counting and the plant can run flat out for the duration without the overrun registering against its permit. The trade is explicit in the text: the grid buys headroom by moving the cost onto whatever airsheds sit downwind of the units that get dispatched. E&E News reported in July, covering an earlier and separate DOE permission for PJM to lean on data-centre backup diesel, that neighbours and the Sierra Club of Virginia objected to exactly this exposure, since backup diesel units "lack air pollution controls designed to safeguard public health." That was a different order and a different heat wave. The structural tension it documented is the one 202-26-41 reproduces.

The order is careful about what the backup fleet is not. Paragraph K states that any backup generation resource subject to it "shall not be considered a capacity resource," and paragraph I routes affected parties to file tariff revisions with FERC, with rate recovery available under 16 U.S.C. § 824a(c). A generator answering an emergency call does not thereby earn a capacity accreditation; it gets paid through a separate cost-recovery channel and reverts to being backup when the window closes.

The Exhibit A list is still growing

The roster of plants under the order is not fixed. Paragraph G lets PJM add units with notice to DOE throughout the emergency period, and it has used that latitude. The version filed on 3 September is captioned Exhibit A VERSION 3, runs to many pages, and notes that "bold units reflect new additions in this version," following a shorter initial filing on 1 September and an update on 2 September. Whether any of the newly bolded units has actually been dispatched past its operating limits was not confirmed at publication; the list documents authorisation reaching further, not activation.

This article is based on a direct statement by the U.S. Department of Energy: Secretary Wright's 1 September Order No. 202-26-41 and the filings on its docket. Gilded Age had not found independent confirmation of the emergency finding, of any resource exceeding its limits, or of backup generation running at the time of writing.

The order settles one thing and leaves the rest open. What is established is a one-week federal window, signed by the Secretary, that turns off rolling-average emissions accounting for a named and expanding list of plants across the largest grid in the country. What would tell us whether the window mattered is a compliance filing showing a Specified Resource dispatched past its permit, or an EEA 3 declaration triggering the diesel last resort, either of which would appear on the CESER docket before the authorisation lapses on 8 September. Until one does, the reliability crisis the order invokes remains PJM's forecast rather than a measured shortfall.