The Trump administration argued on Friday that it used emergency authority to keep certain power plants operating through a prolonged winter storm, helping avoid a widespread blackout despite scattered outages blamed on ice. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the “big picture story” was where the country’s electricity came from during the storm, adding that the administration issued emergency orders after the existing capacity could not deliver power and that “the lights would have gone out if not for emergency orders.”
Wright spoke at a news conference at the Energy Department as the federal government and utilities navigated frigid conditions that had gripped much of the country for more than two weeks. The Associated Press reported that while local power lines were felled by ice accumulation—leaving hundreds of thousands without power at least briefly—Wright and other officials said the nation’s regional power grids generally maintained reliable electricity service.
Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly told reporters that the administration managed to ensure “sufficient capacity,” and said there was “not one area had a blackout or a forced outage due to loss of capacity.” Danly pointed to outage metrics from the storm’s peak, saying nearly 1 million outages occurred but that most were not long-lasting.
Danly also cited specific numbers from the outage-tracking website poweroutage.us, saying nearly 55,000 customers were without power as of Friday. He added that the counts included more than 17,000 customers in Mississippi and about 7,000 in Texas.
The administration’s power-source accounting gave natural gas the leading role during peak generation, with Wright saying it provided 43% of electric power. Wright said coal provided 24% and nuclear accounted for 15%, while he said wind, solar and hydropower together provided 14%. Wright also said the share of coal and natural gas rose substantially during the storm, while wind power use dropped by 40%, and said solar stayed flat at a fraction of what coal and natural gas produced.
Wright dismissed solar as inadequate for severe conditions in some regions, saying it was “meaningless” during a severe storm and warning, “It’s not an all-weather power source.” In the administration’s framing, emergency measures were therefore not simply a political choice but a way to ensure enough generation capacity during an episode of extreme cold and grid stress.
Critics challenged that framing. The AP reported that they said Wright’s remarks understated how much wind and solar contributed during the storm and that emergency and related orders over the past nine months to keep certain oil and coal-fired plants open past planned retirement dates could cost electricity customers billions of dollars over the next few years.
Before and during the storm, the administration also said it excused utilities from pollution limits on fossil-fuel plants and ordered that backup generators at data centers and other large facilities be available to grid operators and utilities for emergency power, according to the AP report. Danly described the Trump administration’s approach as a “new way of doing business” in power emergencies, contrasting it with grid performance during a similar severe storm in 2021.
On the cost and authority questions, the AP reported that preventing coal plants from retiring over the next three years could cost consumers at least $3 billion per year, citing a report from Grid Strategies, a consulting firm. Michael Goggin, an executive vice president at Grid Strategies, said many of the plants were retiring because they were “no longer economic to operate” and that keeping them open was “expensive to keep them going.”
Opponents have also challenged some of the coal-keeping orders in court. The AP reported that the nonprofit owners of the Craig Generating Station in Colorado, along with Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority, filed a protest with the Energy Department seeking to reverse an order that directed the plant’s Unit 1 to stay operating. The complaint described a Dec. 30 order issued one day before the unit was to shut down, and it said the nonprofits were being forced to pay to keep a costly and unreliable plant operating and that the department did not comply with a legal requirement to explain why it was the best alternative.
Wright said the stakes were higher if the orders were not followed, telling reporters there would be “far larger costs from blackouts.” Clean energy advocates, meanwhile, argued that renewable sources saved consumers billions during the storm and helped keep lights on, particularly in regions with investments in wind, solar and energy storage. John Hensley, a senior vice president at the American Clean Power Association, said in Texas wind, solar and storage provided about 25% of power for the grid serving 27 million customers and noted that the share was a major increase over 2021, which he said was a key reason blackouts were largely avoided.
Hensley also said wind and solar accounted for significant power in the Midwest and Southwest, and he pointed to differences elsewhere, including in the mid-Atlantic region served by grid operator PJM. He said only 5% of power there came from wind and solar generation, attributing that gap to a lack of investment and to what he described as hostility by the Trump administration to new wind and solar power. Hensley said blaming renewables for not performing during the storm “is like trying to blame someone on the bench for losing the game,” adding, “They didn’t get a chance” to play.