842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave
11 200As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America's Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat. That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households, meaning that the number of people impacted by these outages is likely to be much larger... Millions of Americans, however, will be contending with a heatwave that is blanketing much of the country, including in Philadelphia where the Salute to Independence Semiquincentennial Parade that had been set for Friday was canceled due to the dangerous heat wave, according to Philadelphia ABC station WPVI. Elsewhere, America's Independence Day Parade, which was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on July 4 in downtown Washington, D.C. was canceled by organizers late Friday evening due to the extreme heat in the District of Columbia... Amtrak announced it will be canceling a number of trains due to heat-related conditions.
The outages seemed to last throughout the day, with 790,103 household outages still in effect by 4:30 p.m. EST. Ironically, the power outages hit several American states that were among the country's original 13 freedom-declaring colonies, including New Jersey (143,072 outages), Pennsylvania (40,944 outages), and Virginia (27,392 outages).
CNBC adds that America's largest power grid operator said Friday "it was under a federal alert to cut electricity consumption across its territory as it battled generator outages, massive overloading on its transmission lines and a surge in air conditioning use from prolonged sweltering heat." PJM said it told utilities to reduce electricity to customers who are under contract to reduce consumption during emergencies. PJM serves 67 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, South and Washington, D.C., area. Spot wholesale electricity prices in northern Virginia, home to the largest collection of data centers in the world, have surged beyond $2,000 per megawatt hour this week. That compares to about $40 per MWh when PJM is not in distress.
11 comments
Re:Power infrastructure (Score: 5, Insightful)
by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @07:04PM (#66222674)
AI companies have been caught lying to investors on numerous occasions. More regulation on data centers is the right action, not less.
In principle, a nation should not permit the private ownership of vital infrastructure. Such as the national grid or large scale power generators. Privatizing everything is a way for corporations to conceal everything, and pass their costs onto consumers and taxpayers. Public transparency of vital infrastructure ought to be a goal for any society, but there are some wrong-headed weirdos that scream "communism" any time we want to look at their books.
China burns 11x the coal, CO2 up 38%. (Score: 5, Informative)
by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @10:38PM (#66222890)
But Trump says Americans need to put coal first
This isn't China. The US President cannot command industry to use coal, as Xi Jinping and the CCP do in China. US industry has been moving away from coal for about 70 years.
... Instead, they changed the way they calculate energy intensity, perhaps to disguise the failure to meet Xi’s target, and set a looser ambition for the next five years. "
You can misrepresent the stats by only looking at coal for electrical power generation, rather than total coal use.
You can misrepresent the stats by citing 2 anomalies of new coal plants, while China is building many new coal plants.
The fact remains the US long trend is moving away from coal, the Chinese long term and ongoing trend is to burn as much coal as they can dig up and import.
The stats speak for themselves. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned for China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions for China up 38% over a 12 year period, down 13%.
"[2026 March 26] Despite being a renewables superpower, China continues to permit and build new coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace. Analysts say the nation’s new five-year plan will ensure further coal plant expansion and jeopardize China’s ability to deliver on its climate promises.
In 2021, China’s leader Xi Jinping made two important promises intended to signal China‘s commitment to fighting climate change. At the Leaders Climate Summit in that April, he announced that China would “strictly control” coal generation until 2025 when it would start to gradually phase it out. He also pledged that year that China would reduce the energy intensity of its economy — the amount of CO2 used to produce a unit of GDP — to 65 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. This month, as China unveiled its plans for the next five years, both promises appeared to be in trouble.
The 15th Five-Year Plan offered a chance to correct these negative trends and get China’s climate ambitions back on track, but it is an opportunity the government appears to have missed
https://e360.yale.edu/features... [yale.edu]
"[2026 Feb 10] Despite media and other reports that China is into “green energy,” the country is still using coal to power its economy, with about 80 to 100 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity added in 2025. The Statistical Review of World Energy reports that coal accounted for 58% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2024, with fossil fuels accounting for a whopping 88%. Coal also provided 58% of China’s electricity generation in 2024. While a report by Ember indicates that populous developing countries like China and India “led the charge in adding more renewable energies” in the first half of 2025, their generation shares show that coal is still king in these countries, and their coal-fired capacity additions indicate that coal will continue to power their economies for the foreseeable future.
The Statistical Review of World Energy reports that coal accounted for 58% of China’s primary energy consumption in 2024. Oil was at 20% and natural gas at 10%. That means that 88% of China’s energy came from fossil fuels. Carbon-free energy (nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, and most other renewables) only provided 12%. Since 2000, China has more than tripled its coal consumption and now uses more coal than the rest of the world’s combined usage, burning 56% of the world’s coal. As Doomberg points out, China consumes almost 20 times the combined consumption of coal by the 27 member states of the European Union, based on 2024 data.
In 2024, China released 11,173 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — 31.5% of the world’s total. That was about 4.5 times as much as the European Union and almost 2.5 times the amount that the United States released.
China produced 57.8% of its electricity from coal and
Re:China burns 11x the coal, CO2 up 38%. (Score: 5, Informative)
by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday July 05, 2026 @04:46AM (#66223122)
The stats speak for themselves. 4.83 billion tons of coal burned for China and 0.42 for the USA. CO2 emissions for China up 38% over a 12 year period, down 13%.
This is highly selective and misleading.
China hit peak coal and is now in decline. New plants are replacing older ones, and are cleaner, and are designed to better load follow so they fit in with renewables. Meanwhile, last year (2025) China installed so much new renewable capacity that the total output for the year (from just the new stuff) equalled the entire output of all sources of generation in Germany.
In one year.
The "but China" argument is well and truly dead. If the US and Europe were doing even half as much as China is to reduce emissions, the world would be in a much, much better place.
Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score: 5, Insightful)
by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:19PM (#66222562)
It is something old nerds are weirdly obsessed with, like Ayn Rand books...
Nuclear power requires a large complex regulatory body that isn't at risk of being interfered with for profit and we burned that bridge to the ground in the last election. The bridge itself was already on fire because it was made of wood from the 1940s...
Meanwhile as long as the country has plenty of land there is absolutely no reason why you can't build out wind and solar and here's a thing that's going to blow your fucking noodle there's no reason why the government can't do that and just give everybody free electricity.
Well there is the Epstein class. They're not going to let you have electricity anymore. There is no amount of money that they are content with and no amount of power that is enough for them. They will not be happy until we are all living in dirt occasionally being blown to pieces by drones if we get too uppity or start building a civilization that could challenge their godhood.
The only place nuclear power makes sense is a handful of countries like Japan that have severe land shortages. Even then I'm not so sure it makes sense especially with their rapidly declining population. Oh and military installations. Basically heavily space constrained places. Even then again we saw what happened in Fukushima when the regulatory framework breaks down and businessmen roll in with dollar signs in their eyes.
You need to explain to me how you stop businessmen from taking over and then skipping all the maintenance. If you can't do that and absolutely nobody here can then there is no way in hell anyone is going to sign off on nuclear unless it's for a giant AI Data Center and then it's going to be poorly built and poorly regulated. Because those companies are already losing money hand over fist and they sure as shit aren't going to spend the money it takes to build a nuclear power plant safely. There is mathematically no reason to because they could just build out solar farms if it wasn't for the fact that the oil companies don't want to let them.
The fact that there are so many old nerds obsessed with nuclear when we could move our grid to wind and solar in no time if we would just stop voting Republican here in the states is why we can't have nice things...
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score: 5, )
by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:49PM (#66222586)
there's no reason why the government can't do that and just give everybody free electricity.
It's not free. Someone has to pay for it. If you're saying the government will build it and then give the electricity away for free, where do you think the government got the money to build it?
This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score: 5, Insightful)
by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @06:05PM (#66222602)
The government could stop sending billions to Israel every year. That would buy a lot of solar.
Re:Nuclear is a dead and dangerous technology (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @06:35PM (#66222634)
This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?
Re:Power infrastructure (Score: 5, Informative)
by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @07:01PM (#66222668)
Power went out during a sunny day during peak demand. This isn't a base load problem, so throw some solar panels and wind turbines down. Takes about 1/10th the time to install and 1/20th the capital. Let's be efficient in how we build our infrastructure, but also do it in a timely manner.
I would rather build more high-voltage direct current (HVDC) that criss-cross the nation and provide a more durable backbone that also enables the trading of energy between large regions undergoing weather related demand. This is going to be a bigger bang for the buck than a handful of nuclear reactors, as those reactor sites will mostly be at existing sites and won't include the infrastructure improvements necessary to deliver the additional power out of their region.
And please don't build modular mini reactors. They cost more to operator overall and produce an exponentially higher amount of radioactive waste. As components wear tends to be high and those worn components become low-grade waste. It's also a Square-Cube law problem, in that a smaller vessel has more surface area for its volume. Every surface is an opportunity for contamination. For the most part, these modular reactors are an investment scam. They have some limited industrial utility, but you shouldn't bother installing one within 50 miles of a major metropolitan area, as there are far better solutions. (better = safer, cheaper, faster, cleaner)
Re:Power infrastructure (Score: 5, Interesting)
by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @08:01PM (#66222726)
The peak demand comes -- right at the time we'd be getting near-peak from solar.
Why isn't the USA focusing more on having people fit solar to their houses with a battery and inverter. This would take the load off the grid during these peak-sun/peak-demand periods and sure-up the grid.
This is one of the few times that the output of renewables tracks demand so why not?
living like 1776 (Score: 5, Funny)
by sziring ( 2245650 ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @04:47PM (#66222512)
So they get to live like it's day one in America
Re:Wait, what? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward ( None ) on Saturday July 04, 2026 @05:12PM (#66222550)
Apparently a lot of drama about this on Twitter / X.
A typical sequence:
- Mamdami posts that NYCers should reduce power usage.
- Nikki Haley quote-tweets Mamdani with something like "this is what happens under socialism."
- A community note points out that Haley did the same thing when she was SC governor.
- 'Free-speech absolutist' Musk has the community note removed.