Shoulder-Season Calm as Structural Pressures Build

Trust, Clarity, and Constant Change

The leadership topic gaining the most traction right now is not some shiny new theory. It is an old problem appearing in new forms. Organizations are changing course more often, moving faster, and asking people to absorb more uncertainty. Employees can live with change. What they struggle with is change that arrives without a clear explanation. That is where trust starts to crack. When leaders keep shifting direction and fail to explain what changed, why it changed, and what stays the same, people stop arguing with the plan and start doubting the people behind it.

Early Summer Heat Pressures Eastern Markets

Wholesale power markets for the seven-day period ending Friday, June 5, 2026, moved decisively out of late-spring shoulder conditions and into an early-summer risk posture. The clearest stress emerged in the East, where PJM issued a Hot Weather Alert for June 5–6 across its Mid-Atlantic and Southern regions ahead of 90-degree temperatures. ISO New England and NYISO, by contrast, remained in summer-readiness mode without a comparable public reliability signal. In the West and central regions, conditions were steadier: CAISO continued routine real-time and EDAM reporting; SPP and MISO maintained active planning and stakeholder calendars; and ERCOT posted largely routine operating notices despite a notable June 1 generation-loss event that did not escalate into a broader emergency.

Managing Delayed Plant Retirements

Much of the utility leadership conversation lately has centered on a simple fact: plants once slated for retirement are still operating because Washington ordered them to remain available. That may sound like a legal story, but inside a utility, it is first and foremost a management story. The Department of Energy has continued to use Section 202(c) emergency authority to keep certain coal and gas units available beyond their planned retirement dates. In 2026 alone, DOE orders have covered plants in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Washington, Colorado, Maryland, and Puerto Rico. On May 21, DOE issued one order keeping Eddystone Units 3 and 4 available through August 22 and another keeping Wagner Unit 4 available through August 19. Days earlier, DOE also authorized PJM to use backup generation at data centers and other major sites as a last resort before rolling blackouts.

Stop Promoting Top Performers into Management

Many companies still make the same bad trade. They take the person who produces the strongest individual work, give that person direct reports, and call it leadership development. Sometimes it works. Often, it does not. The company loses a strong producer, gains an unsteady manager, and then acts surprised when the team slows down.

Whitepaper: Grid Reliability in the Era of Extreme Weather

The U.S. electric power system has entered a reliability era defined by compound stress. Extreme weather is no longer an occasional external disruption managed through emergency restoration after the fact. Heat waves, winter storms, hurricanes, wildfires, drought, high winds, and flooding now shape core assumptions about resource adequacy, transmission planning, distribution investment, fuel assurance, operating reserves, and emergency procedures. This shift is forcing utilities, ISOs/RTOs, state regulators, FERC, NERC, and reliability coordinators to reconsider long-standing planning practices developed around historical weather patterns, deterministic contingency analysis, and relatively stable load growth. The grid reliability challenge is no longer limited to whether enough nameplate capacity exists on paper.