(BPT) - On May 18, 2026, PJM Interconnection — North America's largest power grid operator — scheduled a planned outage to prepare its facilities for summer energy demand. What should have been routine spring maintenance quickly became an emergency.
The night before the outage, an early-season heat wave hit the East Coast. At the same time, according to a May 19 Utility Dive article, more than 40 gigawatts of power plant capacity were offline, leaving PJM's grid, which serves more than 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., with dangerously thin reserves.
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