When Routine Work Stops Being Routine

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.

Tight Spring Loads and Western Market Expansion

Wholesale power markets for the seven-day period ending May 29, 2026, reflected typical shoulder-season conditions, with a clear regional split between modest prices in Western and central markets and firmer prices in parts of the East. CAISO and the broader Western Energy Markets footprint continued to publish daily real-time and EDAM materials, with prices shaped by steep net-load ramps, solar output, congestion, and EDAM's early operating phase. ERCOT, SPP, MISO, AESO, IESO, NYISO, and ISO-NE were generally orderly, while PJM stood out for stronger real-time pricing and continued market-design pressure tied to large-load growth, resource adequacy, and investment incentives.

When Routine Work Stops Being Routine

There is a kind of utility work that nobody used to make speeches about: tree trimming, hazard-tree removal, and routine access to a right-of-way. It sits low on the glamour scale and high on the list of things that quietly keep the lights on. That is exactly why it deserves more attention now. In parts of the U.S. electric power industry, especially where lines cross federal land, routine maintenance has become a management problem with real consequences for reliability, wildfire risk, crew scheduling, customer costs, and executive credibility.