Winter Storm Fern Lessons: Supplying Reliable Power to Meet Peak Demand

Well, good morning. I want to thank our guests for being with us today and making it. Some of our members, unfortunately, are stuck at their home airports right now, and some are on their way and unfortunately some might not be able to get in this morning, but really appreciate you all making the effort to be here today. So the Subcommittee on Energy will come to order, and the chair recognizes himself for five minutes for an opening statement. Again, good morning and welcome to today's hearing to examine the performance of our electric grid through the duration of Winter Storm Fern. Starting on January 23, a significant winter storm brought widespread snow, sleet, and freezing rain from New England to the Rockies and down to the Gulf of America. This storm was followed by an Arctic front that kept stubbornly low temperatures across the country in addition to snowstorms. As expected, American families bundled up, staying indoors to avoid the inclement weather and dangerous road conditions. When they were at home, they relied on our nation's complex energy system to keep the lights on, their homes warmed, and their refrigerators stocked. Just like any other day, families expected their lights to come on with a flick of a switch. While seemingly routine, an exhaustive amount of preparation, coordination, and real-time decision-making occurred behind the scenes to make sure American communities had power. While some outages occurred, the grid held up because of the important work of some of the witnesses we have before us today. The Southwest Electric Power Company, or SWEPCO, is an electric utility across Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. The Northeast Gas Association represents natural gas utilities across 11 northeastern states. Grid Strategies develops public policies that support a clean energy transition, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, is the regulatory authority that ensures reliability and security of our nation's bulk power system. Today, these witnesses will provide critical insights into how the nation's electric grid remained resilient through the duration of this significant weather event. While I am looking forward to today's opportunity to learn more about the grid's performance through the storm, one thing remains clear: base load and dispatchable resources saved the day. Generation from coal, natural gas, and fuel oil skyrocketed while intermittent resource generation unfortunately plummeted. Nuclear has always remained steady and reliable. Without access to these affordable and reliable supplies of base load generation, the setting of this hearing would look much different. Power outages that occur in freezing temperatures cause billions in economic damage and, even more importantly, tragic deaths in our vulnerable communities. Our New England states illustrate an interesting example. Through the storm, the fuel mix in New England was carried by natural gas, fuel oil, and nuclear power. In spite of generous subsidies and favorable public policy choices, intermittent resources were nowhere to be found when New England needed power the most. Because limited gas pipeline capacity in the New England region restricts supply and raises prices, power plants had to opt for more expensive and less efficient fuel oil. It is important to recognize fuel oil plants were the predominant source of generation 70 years ago. Importantly, outages across the country were limited, but the success of the grid through the Winter Storm Fern should serve as a warning. That brings us to the present day. How should policymakers and regulators consider the operation of our future bulk power system? We stand on the precipice of tremendous growth in our nation's electricity demand. The Energy and Commerce Committee has held several hearings and passed legislation to shore up reliability crises caused by the Biden administration and to power next-generation industries. Now, we are considering the implications of a generation resource mix that can appropriately meet the needs of households at all times of the year while simultaneously ensuring America leads in the future economy. The answer is clear: our nation needs more dispatchable power, and it needs a lot more of it. Given the military activity taking place in Iran and the implications of energy markets throughout the Strait of Hormuz, now more than ever we need to utilize the bountiful resources we have here right in the United States. The lessons of Winter Storm Fern should illustrate that common sense must rule the day. American energy dominance and independence must be achieved so we can keep our communities safe at home. With that, I yield back the balance of my time, and at this time, the chair recognizes the gentleman from California's 50th District for five minutes for an opening statement.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this important hearing. Ranking Member Castor was delayed by the weather today, so I am stepping in for her to give an opening statement. At nearly every hearing this year, we have talked about the significant growth in energy demand every region in the United States will face. And even though that growth is very exciting, it comes with real challenges that everyone in this room is grappling with. Americans are feeling the strain of these challenges on their wallet. Electricity costs are 8 percent higher today than they were a year ago. Some projections show residential utility rates climbing as much as 18 percent in the coming years, and no region has been spared. We have also been saying at nearly every hearing this Congress that we are running out of time. I and every utility, grid operator, and developer I talk to do not think we are ready to meet the current moment. Right now, we are on track to lose our competitive edge to nations like China. So far in the 2020s, China has completed more than 8,200 miles of high-voltage long-range transmission lines, while the U.S. has built only 375. European utilities are also rapidly increasing the minimum transfer capacity between countries to move power back and forth. Over 125,000 miles of advanced conductors, which can help us get the most out of the grid, have been installed in India, Europe, and China. The United States has installed less than 10 percent of that. By focusing only on building the kinds of generation one party likes, or by keeping old, inefficient, and expensive coal plants online, we are holding our country back. Every witness before us has been clear: we need more of everything, whether it be transmission, pipelines, solar, wind, or gas. But that does not mean we need to keep every asset that is uneconomic or inefficient. Now, instead of focusing on how to develop a long-term plan and holistic energy strategy, which has been proven to decrease costs and improve reliability for everyone, we are constantly talking about short-term fixes that will increase costs, steamroll state regulators, and negatively affect reliability in the long run. Look at Texas, which is slated to receive roughly half of U.S. industrial electricity demand growth through 2030. When the natural gas system failed and people died from cold in Superstorm Yuri, did Texas exclusively turn to more natural gas or keeping coal plants open? No. Texas reduced its risk of blackouts and brownouts from 10 percent to 1 percent by deploying all resources, including solar energy and batteries for storage. Now, they are primed to dominate this area of sustained load growth because they built new generation to meet new demand instead of only holding on to the past. To confront this challenge, we as a country must build more generation, make it easier to connect that generation to the grid, and increase regional and interregional access to that energy. Right now, there are over 2,500 gigawatts worth of energy projects in the interconnection queue, which is the number one barrier to connecting resources. It is insufficient grid capacity or too much congestion in a given area. So you can build all the generation you want, but if you cannot connect it, you cannot use it. In 2024, that transmission congestion, our inability to move power around the grid, cost customers over $12 billion, and it happened during Winter Storm Fern. We need to build a better grid nationwide, which will increase competition, reduce congestion, and ensure customers can access the next cheapest electron. That is our North Star. Now, North American Electric Reliability Corporation, represented by one of our witnesses today, has said clearly that an additional 35 gigawatts of interregional transfer capacity across the country would make the grid more resilient, lower costs, and enable us to better meet load growth. I agree with my colleagues in the majority that the federal government needs to take a somewhat stronger hand in planning and permitting, in collaboration with state partners, to make sure we can keep the lights on, but we need to stop looking backward. It is difficult to reach consensus, but doing nothing is costing us money, hurting the reliability of the grid, and making us less competitive. We need everyone at the table, and we will not meet this moment if our approach is business as usual. I look forward to hearing about some potential solutions from our witnesses and working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to find some as well. Thank you, and I yield back.

Thank you very much. The gentleman yields back the balance of his time. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Kentucky, the chairman of the full Committee of Energy and Commerce, for five minutes for an opening statement.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the recognition, appreciate our witnesses being here today. The massive winter storms have put our vital energy and power delivery system to the test this year. Today's focus on Winter Storm Fern helps direct attention to what really matters for designing our electric system: making sure energy systems provide the power Americans need when they need it. Fern and other recent major storms like Elliott in 2022 and Yuri in 2021 present consistent lessons to discuss this morning. First, reliable generation resources matter. When power demand spikes during major winter storms, 80 to 90 percent of additional electricity needed is supplied by dispatchable fossil generation: natural gas, coal, and even oil. Nuclear consistently provides base load power, and these dispatchable resources step into the breach. Wind power may supply additional energy in some regions, but despite its enormous capacity, it cannot be relied upon during these storms. Solar energy can be relied upon even less so. Second, preparation and planning matters. Vast multi-day deep freezes challenge fuel and grid systems across large regions. This requires planning and coordination to make sure power will be available as demand spikes. The storm Elliott caused the highest single-day electricity demand on record during the winter months. It also caused 90 gigawatts of cold-weather-related generation outages, more than other recent storms. Operators underestimated the demand and the extent of the freeze, which reduced gas supplies and gas generation. The storm was so large, southeastern states could not import sufficient power from other regions, which were short excess power themselves. This caused rolling blackouts, including in Kentucky on Christmas Eve. Authorities said a longer freeze would have been catastrophic for the New York City gas supplies. How past lessons informed preparation for last month's storm will be useful to examine today. The Trump administration leaned in effectively on coordination. Gas generators withstood winter impacts better than in past storms, and there was much more energy to dispatch as demand spiked. Third, what we do in the future matters. Expanding generation in a grid to meet massive new energy demand requires a focus on policies that ensure reliable, affordable power delivery. Storms like Fern show us the generation mix that we can depend upon when it matters most. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank our witnesses for being here, and I'll yield back.

Thank you very much. The gentleman yields back the remainder of his time. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from New Jersey, the ranking member of the full committee, for five minutes for an opening statement.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today's hearing addresses an important topic, but given that this committee has jurisdiction over the reliability and affordability of all energy, not just electricity, we should really be addressing skyrocketing oil prices, all the result of Trump deciding to wage an irresponsible war in Iran. The war is throwing the region and gas prices into chaos. Two weeks ago, President Trump threw the Middle East into chaos with his irresponsible war, and in the week since, it has become clear that no one in the Trump administration had a plan for what to do about oil prices, let alone any plans on how to end a war that should never have happened. And the level of incompetence to me is astounding. Oil prices have been extraordinarily volatile, while gasoline prices have increased by nearly 75 cents per gallon since the start of the year. Some analysts think that oil could reach over $200 per barrel, and it is clear that the Trump administration has no idea how to fix it. In fact, Trump does not actually consider this a problem. Just last week he said, and I quote, "When oil prices go up, we make a lot of money." I don't know about you, but when oil prices go up, my constituents feel it with their wallets. American families feel it as they sit around their kitchen table, trying to figure out how they're going to make ends meet. It's once again crystal clear that the president only cares about making big oil CEOs a buck, and that's who he's talking about when he said, "We make a lot of money." And once again, American families suffer. They're left paying the bill. Now, the president and congressional Republicans are not only driving up oil prices, their policies are also driving up monthly power bills, which gets to the topic of today's hearing. Just under two months ago, much of the southern and eastern parts of the country were under a blanket of snow. Temperatures plummeted, winds whipped, and many of us feared the worst. However, the bulk power system endured. And that's not to say that there weren't localized issues. Local distribution systems suffered, with freezing rain and wind taking down power lines and causing blackouts. Utility crews worked around the clock to restore power, and all of us are thankful for their hard work. But at the end of the day, unlike in Texas during Winter Storm Uri or the Southeast during Winter Storm Elliott, there was enough supply of electricity to meet demand. Grid reliability is a team sport. Every resource, including wind, solar, and storage, has a role to play. These resources were especially vital during Winter Storm Fern as renewables in general exceeded expectations. They were able to take on more of a role than the grid operators required. But that was not the case for every resource. The weather knocked roughly 20 gigawatts of largely fossil fuel resources offline in the Mid-Atlantic alone, due in part to freeze-offs at gas wellheads. Unfortunately, transmission constraints harmed the grid during the winter storm and helped bring us close to the brink. Within PJM, power in Chicago was bottled up and couldn't reach the East Coast to help lower prices. In the middle of the country, Southwest Power Pool had to curtail nearly 10 gigawatts of wind energy at one point because it didn't have the transmission capacity to take that power to where it was needed most. A 2024 study by the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation found that our country needs over 35 gigawatts of new interregional transmission for its reliability needs alone. And that's before taking into account the tremendous growth in data centers fueling artificial intelligence applications that we've seen following that study. So if Republicans are serious about wanting to make our grid more resilient to extreme weather, we should be talking about how to build more large interregional power lines. And finally, Mr. Chairman, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge a central irony of what some of my colleagues are advocating for today. We all agree that severe weather events stress the grid unlike anything else. But the increase in severe weather events is fueled by the same polluting coal power plants that many Republicans want to be the solution to severe weather events. Forcing every coal plant in this country to stay online will further exacerbate climate change in the coming decades. So we must invest in real, durable reliability for the power grid. And with that, I thank you and yield back, Mr. Chairman, the balance of my time.

Well, thank you very much. The gentleman yields back the balance of his time. This concludes member opening statements. The chair reminds members that pursuant to the committee rules, all members' opening statements will be made part of the record. And again, we want to thank our witnesses for appearing today and taking time to testify before the subcommittee. Each witness will have the opportunity to give an opening statement, followed by a round of questions from the members of the subcommittee. And just real quick, if I could, housekeeping, you want to pull those mics up close to you when you speak. With the lights there, just a quick explanation, they'll be green for four minutes, that turns yellow at the for the last minute, and turns red when your time's up. So our witnesses today are Mr. James Robb, the president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, NERC; Mr. Brett Mattison, president and CEO of Southwestern Electric Power Company; Mr. Michael Goggin, the executive vice president of Grid Strategies; and Mr. Jose Costa, the president and CEO of Northeast Gas Association. Again, we appreciate you all being here today. And Mr. Robb, you are recognized for five minutes for your opening statement.

Terrific. Good morning, Chairman Latta, Representative Peters, and members of the subcommittee. Thank you for letting me set the table for today's hearing. I'm speaking here today on behalf of NERC, the independent, nonpartisan, FERC-certified electric reliability organization structured by Congress through the Energy Policy Act of 2005. So here's the top line. Even though many metrics show strong grid performance, risk is growing more acute. Nearly two-thirds of the country is at elevated or high risk of energy shortfall over the next five years. Winter Storm Fern was a severe, long-duration event that significantly stressed the grid. During Fern, the industry showed commendable improvement in cold weather performance. However, the system ran very close to the edge, leaving no room for error. Operators needed every tool at their disposal, and extraordinary actions by government played an important role. Fern was a classic near-miss event that reinforces concerns documented in our recent LTRA. That report assesses risk of energy shortfall over a 10-year horizon, and importantly, it's a risk assessment, not a prediction. It shows where the system is exposed. In a space filled with single-issue advocates, NERC's LTRA is unique because it's the only independent and transparent assessment of this type, rigorously peer-reviewed with geographic and temporal consistency. Congress was quite wise in how they conceived the model of the ERO. So three trends explain why two-thirds of the nation risks energy shortage. These include unprecedented demand growth, a changing resource mix with increasingly unfamiliar reliability characteristics, and lagging supply additions that are not keeping up with growth and planned retirements. Let me start with demand. Over the next 10 years, electricity demand projections are higher than we've ever seen at any point in the last two decades. These trends are driven by the proliferation of large industrial loads, particularly but not exclusively data centers, and expanding use of electric heating and electric vehicles. The rate of increase is staggering. Summer peak demand is projected to rise by over 200 gigawatts, with winter demand growing faster. That's 70 percent higher than what we projected at this time last year. Next, the generation basis is changing. As older generators retire and get replaced by power electronics-based renewables and batteries, the resource mix is becoming increasingly variable and weather-dependent. And there is a decline in the essential reliability services that are necessary to support voltage, frequency, and ramping needs. Over the next 10 years, coal and natural gas generation is projected to decline from 62 percent to 48 percent, while renewables and batteries will grow from 12 to 34 percent on peak. These renewable resources work very, very well in the summer, but are frequently challenged to perform during winter events. Finally, energy supply is just falling short. Winter growth is projected to exceed resource addition by over 60 gigawatts. Projects need to get out of the queue and into the ground much more quickly. A recent Berkeley Lab study finds that even projects with interconnection agreements are taking longer to reach operation, and many projects, including those with strong sponsorship, never get built at all. Let me turn back to Fern. The storm brought long-duration cold, widespread snow, sleet, and freezing rain across the eastern two-thirds of the country. Demand forecast surged, and industry activated an extensive array of operating procedures to manage the reliability risk. DOE stepped in with emergency orders. During the event, natural gas, coal, and nuclear resources provided most of the generation. However, renewables did contribute. In New England, fuel oil and liquefied natural gas kept the lights on. And in general, the natural gas system performed better than in previous storms, and gas storage withdrawals were essential. However, this storm was not as cold as initially forecast, and widespread closures of schools and businesses alleviated pressure on the combined systems. This outcome reflects years of sustained and ongoing winterization efforts following Winter Storms Uri and Elliott, industry preparation and collaboration, and extensive outreach by NERC and its regional entities. Nevertheless, the widespread use of emergency procedures and extraordinary government actions are powerful warnings that we should not ignore. A system bordering on the edge during winter extreme should not be normalized. A larger, colder, longer storm would have had far more consequence. We have four primary recommendations to address these challenges. First, we just got to get off the dime and effectively address siting and permitting reform at the federal, state, and local levels. We need to accelerate efforts to speed resource addition. We need to reliably figure out how to reliably integrate large loads. And we need to accelerate efforts to better coordinate the increasingly interdependent gas and electric systems that serve this country. So thank you for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to answering your questions.

Well, thank you very much for your statement. And Mr. Mattison, you are recognized for five minutes for your opening statement.

Thank you, sir. Chairman Latta and Congressman Peters and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Brett Mattison and I serve as the president and chief operating officer of Southwestern Electric Power Company, known as SWEPCO, a subsidiary of an American Electric Power. SWEPCO has provided electricity, reliable electricity for more than a century and today serves approximately 558,000 customers across Louisiana, Arkansas, Northeast Texas, and the Texas Panhandle. With nearly 1,400 employees, we operate a diverse generation portfolio that includes coal, natural gas, wind, and purchased power. Winter Storm Fern brought extreme cold across our service territory, with temperatures dripping, dipping to negative two in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and 17 degrees in Shreveport, Louisiana. More than 200,000 customers were impacted and restored thanks to the dedication of our SWEPCO team, including IBEW frontline employees who worked in truly difficult situations. Our experience during Winter Storm Fern and other recent winters reaffirm a core principle. Reliability depends on being able to call on a resource when it's needed for as long as it's needed, regardless of the weather. During the storm, coal supplied more than half of SWEPCO-owned generation, supported by on-site fuel that ensured steady performance. Natural gas units provide essential flexibility and ramped as demand increased, but remains tied to pipeline delivery, which can and does tighten during extreme weather. And wind resources contributed and supported the system, but their output varies with weather conditions and cannot substitute for a round-the-clock resource. Since Winter Storm Yuri in 2021, SWEPCO has made substantial reliance improvements. As we plan the system needed for this new era, I'd like to emphasize five points. First, new natural gas plants will be indispensable. The unit SWEPCO plan to build will include robust cold weather enhancements and must be paired with reliable pipeline capacity. Second, new nuclear energy will be crucial for long-term zero-carbon baseload power. SWEPCO is currently evaluating opportunities in Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana to support the advancement of nuclear technologies. Third, existing baseload resources, especially coal, continue to provide vital reliability during extreme conditions. Federal policy must avoid premature retirements until new equally dependable resources are available. Fourth, a resilient future requires modern transmission. Policies at FERC and regional planning bodies such as the Southwest Power Pool must support strong interregional transmission, including 765 kV lines to enhance both reliability and affordability. Finally, across all of this, affordability must be maintained as a priority. Existing customers cannot be asked to shoulder the cost of integrating new large loads. Long-term arrangements, innovative rates, and coordinated regional planning are helping to ensure that growth benefits all customers. Our grid is facing extraordinary challenges, but with the right policies and the right investments, we can ensure the system remains reliable, affordable, and resilient. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify and I look forward to your questions.

Well, thank you for your opening statement. Mr. Goggin, you are recognized for five minutes for your opening statement.

Chair Latta, Mr. Peters, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today. My testimony reviews the data from Winter Storm Fern and other recent events to make five main points. First, wind and solar resources performed well during Winter Storm Fern and other recent events, while fossil generation did not. Second, in all recent cold snap events, natural gas accounted for the majority of generator outages, followed by coal. We also saw natural gas prices spike during Winter Storm Fern and these other events, costing consumers billions of dollars. Fourth, I recommend that a diverse generation mix increases resilience. Each resource type has distinct outage risks, so a diverse mix reduces the economic and reliability risk to ratepayers. And finally, expanding transmission increases resilience by providing Americans with more affordable and reliable power and tapping into diversity among regions in the timing of peak demand and generator outages. First, let's look at generator performance. Wind and solar provided around 20 to 25 percent of the power during Winter Storm Fern's peak demand periods in Texas and the two other large grid operators in the middle of the country, the Southwest Power Pool and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator. At the Southwest Power Pool, MISO, and PJM regions experienced peak demand during Winter Storm Fern, wind and solar provided over 38,000 megawatts, nearly twice the 21,000 megawatts of output they are compensated to provide and are expected to provide during peak demand events. By exceeding grid operators' expectations by over 17,000 megawatts, wind and solar picked up some of the slack as gas underperformed its accredited capacity by 52,000 megawatts and coal by 7,000 megawatts. Gas and coal generators fell short of grid planners' expectations during Winter Storm Fern, largely because they experienced outages at many times higher rates higher than renewable generation. This is consistent with performance patterns during other recent extreme weather events like Winter Storms Yuri and Elliott, when gas generators accounted for 63 percent and 55 percent of outages respectively. Coal and gas generators depend on fuel deliveries and access to cooling water, while wind and solar do not. Retiring coal generators that the Department of Energy has mandated remain online also performed poorly during Winter Storm Fern, consistently delivering only 29 to 42 percent of their capacity according to the Department of Energy's own numbers. In contrast, the largely complete Vineyard Wind project, which the administration has repeatedly attempted to halt by retroactively revoking its permits, operated at a 75 percent capacity factor during Winter Storm Fern, delivering more than 400 megawatts into New England. Land-based wind and solar powered tens of millions of homes as the central and eastern U.S. experienced peak demand during Winter Storm Fern, just as they did during other recent winter storms. Intruding on state authority and impeding market forces, which are replacing uneconomic and unreliable old power plants with modern resources, only results in higher costs and less reliability for ratepayers. During Winter Storm Fern and other recent winter storms, gas's performance problem was partially caused by gas wells freezing. This happened in Texas during Winter Storm Yuri and in the Marcellus Shale area during Winter Storm Elliott. Each took offline about 20 percent of total U.S. gas production, which played a major role in kickstarting the cascading failures that led to rolling blackouts in Texas and parts of the Southeast in those events. Winter Storm Fern was less cold, and it caused about a 10 percent drop in gas production, which led to gas prices spiking to 60 to 90 times normal in many parts of the eastern U.S., costing consumers billions of dollars. Domestic natural gas prices are also increasingly tethered to global prices due to liquefied natural gas exports. By diversifying our generation mix with wind and solar, which will always have a fuel cost of zero, we can protect consumers from both short-term gas price volatility during extreme weather as well as long-term uncertainty due to global geopolitical events like the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. A stronger transmission grid also would have provided Americans with more affordable and reliable power during these extreme weather events. Expanded transmission between Texas and the Southeast could have kept the heat on for millions of Texans during Winter Storm Yuri, while the same ties could have kept the lights on for customers in the Southeast during Winter Storm Elliott, providing more than a billion dollars in value. In Winter Storm Fern, a modest transmission expansion between western and eastern PJM would have saved ratepayers in eastern U.S. around $90 million. Customers across the Midwest similarly could have saved tens of millions of dollars with stronger transmission ties among those grid operating areas. Transmission provides these benefits by tapping into diversity in the timing of peak demand and generator outages among regions. Extreme weather events just don't hit the entire country at once and they move over time, so imports from neighboring regions are a key tool for cost-effective resilience. In short, a diverse generation mix and transmission that taps into regional diversity are the best solutions for ensuring Americans have affordable and reliable power in the face of extreme weather, wars, and other uncertainties.

Well, thank you very much for your opening statement. And Mr. Costa, you are recognized for five minutes for your opening statement.

Chairman Latta, Mr. Peters, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Jose Costa, and I'm president of the Northeast Gas Association, and I represent the natural gas industry in the Northeast. I appreciate the chance to share insights from Winter Storm Fern and extended cold that followed. This event tested our energy systems and underscored a reality. Our infrastructure is operating at maximum capacity, and we need to invest in new natural gas infrastructure and storage. I would like to first highlight how the industry performed before discussing some of the significant stresses experienced. To begin, during Fern, Appalachian producers performed exceptionally well. They deserve recognition for their winterization efforts. Moving upstream, pipeline operators and gas utilities ensured that gas was delivered to where it was needed. During and after Fern, Northeast pipelines recorded some of the highest flow days ever, and utilities met record-setting customer demand. This is only possible because of the maintenance and preparations they do in advance and the dedicated efforts of their workforce. Fern clearly showed just how reliable the gas industry is. However, the Northeast natural gas infrastructure is significantly constrained. As demand peaked, New England's pipelines reached their max flows, the region turned to LNG import facilities and on-system LNG storage to provide additional supply to the region. Across the Northeast, natural gas is typically the dominant fuel for electric generation. As supplies tightened, the pipelines continued to move significant volumes of gas to their firm gas utility customers. However, eventually they reached a point where they could no longer supply gas to power plants that do not hold firm contracts. During this period, natural gas remained the essential baseline fuel supporting the region's electric grid, supplying at least a quarter of the generation in New England. For several days, gas-fired generation in New England relied on LNG imports to maintain operations. It should also be noted that this event went as well as it did due to significant industry coordination and communication with our partners in the electric sector and in government. NGA's gas supply task force was activated throughout the event, and NGA closely coordinated with broader industry through the electric gas operations committee, which we co-chair with ISO New England. However, while we weathered the storm, this event tested the Northeast. An earlier arrival to the blizzard of 2026 could have been the tipping point. As I said, this extended cold led to extreme demand across the region. All three regional ISOs reported elevated and sustained demand for the duration. As available pipeline gas tightened, the region became increasingly dependent on fuels delivered by truck and barge. This required state and federal agencies to issue waivers, including allowing drivers to drive extended hours in sometimes dangerous conditions. Further complicating the supply chain, oil fuel depots experienced delivery disruptions. This is not reliable, sustainable, or cost-effective. And all this led to some of the highest wholesale energy prices the Northeast has ever seen. Gas spot prices for New York and Connecticut were 17 times higher than prices just across the state line in Northeast Pennsylvania. Power prices in New England and New York also spiked to record levels. Gas utilities take steps to mitigate price spikes, including buying firm transportation supply contracts, implementing financial hedging, and utilizing storage. Yet despite these efforts, it is impossible to protect customers completely from market volatility like we saw this winter. It's important to note that we support an all-energy source solution. However, during Fern, weather-dependent resources failed to meet the moment. Many generators in New York and New England switched to oil, with oil becoming New England's leading fuel source for power generation. This immediately led to emissions increases. In fact, according to ISO New England, CO2 emissions in New England this January were up an estimated 24 percent compared to January 2025. Finally, a better path is available. Thoughtful investment in more natural gas infrastructure can improve reliability, reduce costs, and cut reliance on higher-emitting fuels. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to answering your questions.

Well, thank you all for your opening statements. Greatly appreciate it. And this does conclude the opening statements from our witnesses, and we'll now begin with questions from our members. And I'll begin the questioning and recognize myself for five minutes. First, the question I ask everyone that comes before us in this subcommittee. Do we need to have more energy or less energy in this country?

More.

Much more.

More and more diverse.

Much more.

Well, thank you very much. I know that when we had the RTOs and the ISOs and ERCOT in last year, they all said the exact same thing. We have to have more, and they also added that we have to make sure that we're not taking off any existing generation offline. And that's where I'm going to start with my questions with you, Mr. Robb, because, you know, you in your statement mentioned about the premature thermal retirements going offline in the next five years. What's going to happen?

So the loss of those resources creates multiple problems for the grid. You know, the first is you lose the energy production. Many of those facilities aren't extremely large producers of energy, but they're strategically located. And one of the things that's very important about traditional generation is it provides what we call essential reliability services. They can be controlled within very tight parameters. They provide support for the frequency of the grid, the voltage of the grid, and they can be ramped up and down to accommodate changes in load or changes in the performance of other generating resources. So they're absolutely essential to the reliable performance of the grid.

Well, thank you. Mr. Mattison, if I could ask this question because you're talking about the reliability out there and also that coal is 50 percent of the power during the storm, if I understood that correctly. What happened if we didn't have that generation at this time?

Quite honestly, if we didn't have that dispatchable resource that's reliable and dependable and it was 50 percent of our load during that storm, unfortunately, we would have had customers' lights go out.

Okay. Thank you. Mr. Costa, being up in the Northeast, you're talking about the LNG storage. If you could have one number one ask to Congress, what would it be?

Can you repeat that again? I'm sorry.

If you had one number one ask to Congress, what would it be?

I think we need more. The permitting reform, the work you're doing on permitting reform is critical to bring more supplies from Marcellus Shales to the region.

Well, and you know, that's important because, you know, from the beginning of this Congress, the first thing that we've heard pretty much is almost on an even scale. We have to be producing that energy, but we also have the permitting reform because what good is having energy if you can't move it from point A to point B? And so that's an important thing that we're talking and trying to get done in this committee and it's at the top of the list when it comes right down to it. Mr. Robb, how, when you talk about the energy supply, how can we speed up the process, especially on permitting? How would you see it done?

I'm not sure I have a good prescription for the answer here. I think it's clear that we've seen some agencies reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the environmental impact statement. FERC's made some very strong progress in that area. But at the end of the day, we're not getting stuff built quickly. The most recent interstate transmission lines took 15 to 20 years to get built. A natural gas plant might take seven years to get built. And the problem is that we can add a data center, which is an enormous consumer of power as everyone's noted, in 18 to 24 months. And we want those data centers to get built. So all these timeframes need to be compressed. And whether that's done through permitting reform, other actions to speed the development of resources, unclogging supply chains, speeding interconnection queues, all those are part of the solution and need to be pursued.

Thank you. Mr. Mattison, in your five points that you laid out, one of the things that you talked about again is really on our modernization of that transmission and the permitting and really the supply chain. In my last about 50 seconds, how can we make sure we can live up to that because it's taking so long to get these things done?

I think on a state basis that we've got each of our three states, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, have really done a good job in clearing the way. But we need federal policy to, as Mr. Robb to my right is stating, that we can get things accelerated with policies that allow us to build transmission a lot faster, a lot quicker than we are today.

Well, and again, that's one of the things that this subcommittee's been looking at because again, we all recognize the absolute need when we've seen a flatlining out there of electricity usage over a good number of years and how it's just skyrocketed up. We've got to get this thing done. My time's expired and I recognize the gentleman from California's 50th District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I really enjoyed being a trial lawyer when I did environmental law. But I always thought that if you went to trial, it was because someone misunderstood their leverage. And really a good lawyer serves his or her client best by finding where there's agreement and trying to settle the case ahead of time. And this strikes me as something where we should not be going to trial. We seem to have violent agreement among everyone. There's not disagreement about what you're talking about. Everyone's talking past each other. We need new natural gas facilities. Sure, we understand that. We also understand it takes seven years and there's no way to connect them. New nuclear, there's virtually unanimous support in this room for new nuclear. Virtually unanimous. Regarding the existing base load, the premature retirement, of course we understand we don't want to retire things prematurely. I think Democrats object to propping them up artificially when the market wants to retire them. Every single person talks about transmission here. This committee's done nothing on transmission, but everyone says interregional transmission is important for reliability, for cost control, for competition. We know we need it for interconnection. You could build a gas plant tomorrow at PJM, there's no way to connect it because there's no capacity on the grid. We agree on that. We agree that affordability is a priority, as Mr. Mattison said. We understand that a diverse mix compensates for the defects in each particular form of energy because none of it's perfect. You love natural gas, it's not perfect. You love wind, it's not perfect. We understand that. And the market is driving us to more diversity, the kinds of things that Mr. Goggins was talking about. We understand fuel oil in New England is bad. We want to get rid of that. That's dumb, right? We all understand that. And we all know that increasingly everyone understands the need for permit reform and speed. So as I look at this as a lawyer, I think that this case should be settled. We should do it now and we should move on. And the fights we're fighting, like Mr. Latta always asks, do we need more power? We all know we need more power. So it's very frustrating for me who used to litigate cases to say why we should not take this to trial and to see everyone agree from up here and agree over the course of the last year and a half the same thing. I'd like to introduce for the record this article, Winter Storm Fern Highlights the Need for More Resilient Transmission, talking about how regions across the country are exporting and importing all types of energy over that four-day period during Fern.

Without objection, so ordered.

I guess I want to ask Mr. Robb, last year NERC released a study that said an additional 35 gigawatts of interregional transfer capability, which are grid connections among regions, would make the grid more resilient against extreme weather, lower costs, and enable us to meet load growth. I understand we need more generation and reforms to the permitting process as part of the solution here. Can you talk about how those grid connections help on the transmission, help resources like coal or natural gas, not just renewables?

Well, the whole premise of interregional transmission is to be able to move power from a region that has excess into a region that has deficit. And you cited the study that we conducted and it showed 35, 37 gigawatts. The important thing to note about that is it's not evenly distributed. There are certain areas of the country where that transmission would be valuable from a reliability perspective. And it would benefit all resources, whether it's wind, solar, coal, natural gas, nuclear, what have you, because it would expand market opportunities and access. It would also improve reliability for those areas that find themselves at times in reserve deficit to be able to import.

That's regardless of the generation source, right?

Irrespective of the generation source.

Okay. Mr. Goggins, I know folks have done analysis about how during the storm Fern, there was sufficient generation available that couldn't be transmitted to where it was needed because of transmission congestion. Can you give us a brief example of that happening and whether it had an impact on customer costs?

Absolutely. There were a number of points of congestion on the grid and it shows that we do need these not just for reliability, but for economics. We need to expand our grid and allow these flows from region to region as well as within regions. One example is within PJM. Consumers in this area in eastern PJM paid about $90 million more than they should have because there was abundant low-cost generation in the western part of PJM in northern Illinois and places like that that could not make it here. We similarly saw wind generation being curtailed in the Southwest Power Pool. That would have been worth over $30 million if it could have been delivered into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator area, also in the Midwest, as they experienced peak demand. So tens of millions of dollars left on the table.

And I would just say, look, I'm willing to work with everyone in this committee room to do this. Part of the federal reason we're a federal government is we should be forcing these connections across state lines to serve all of our constituents and all of the states. And I think we've got to get about the business of doing that. I yield back.

Thank you. The gentleman yields back. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Kentucky, the chair of the full committee, for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Appreciate the recognition. Appreciate you all for being here. And I just want to make sure, it seems like there's a sort of a disconnect in some of the testimony. Clearly dispatchable energy provided the bulk of power during the storm. Yet we hear wind outperformed gas and coal in terms of accredited capacity, which as I understand it, basically just means it performed higher than expected. So for example, if it was only budgeted for 2 percent but performed at 4 percent, proponents would claim that's a major increase or major performance, but it pales in comparison to dispatchable power. So for example, the MISO system during the storm, variable wind power ranged from 20 percent supply to 3 percent supply, while gas and coal dispatched from 78 percent to 62 percent of the power depending on what was needed. So Mr. Mattison, as an operator, do you rely more on gas and coal or wind when a major storm is approaching?

Thank you for your question. We do have a diverse mix in our portfolio. However, whenever we know that there's a winter storm like Fern approaching, we need to make sure that our resources that are dispatchable are ready at any moment's notice because they are dependable, reliable, and dispatchable is the key. Our wind assets performed decent during Fern, unlike in winter storm Heather earlier in the year where there was a lot of icing, they did not. So I want everyone on the committee to understand that our North Star is our customer. That's what we focus on and we have to keep their lights on regardless of policies, etc. We want to make sure our units are running. So we spent about $7.5 million winterizing our units as a result of winter storm Uri taught us a lesson to make sure they're ready and available. So we put a lot of emphasis on that dispatchable resource when a winter storm's coming.

Thank you. So it's wind and solar works when the wind's blowing steady, not fast, and when the sun's shining. But that's somebody told me, he said, well, that was an unusual day. That's why you could see the wind and solar didn't perform the way it was supposed to. So while you need power on the unusual, that's when you need it the most. So you can't dismiss that. So Mr. Robb, you say that various emergency actions during Fern should serve as a warning. What do you mean by that?

Excuse me, thank you for the question. I get very worried when we normalize risk. And for as everyone's noted, an uninterruptible supply of power in the 21st century is absolutely essential to every aspect of our lives. And when we run close to the edge like we did during Fern, that should serve as a wake-up call and be viewed for what it is, a near-miss situation. This storm could have been much worse. What bailed the system out was the fact it wasn't as cold as projected and we saw a lot of load shed occur because businesses and schools were shut down and that's not a societal outcome that we want. So the system is losing margin. That's driving operators to have to go to more and more extreme operating measures and they need every tool, they needed every tool in their toolkit to keep the lights on across the country. That's not the way we want to run the electric grid that's so essential to our life.

So thank you. So question, my next question, so huge multi-day storms can limit help from other regions. During Christmas 2022, when Winter Storm Elliott hit, two Kentucky utilities were unable to get enough power from PJM to keep their lights on. During Fern, despite a brand new large transmission line, Hydro-Québec sent power meant for New England to its own Canadian customers. So Mr. Costa, what does this say about the importance of ensuring dependable resources within regions?

Thank you for the question, Congressman. You are correct that what we saw during Fern was that we actually had wood burning and trash incineration produce more electricity at that time than we did with the weather-dependent energy sources.

Yeah, I saw that and I kept checking back, this has to be some trick on the internet, but it's absolutely true that in New England, by burning wood and refuse, you created more energy than wind and solar.

That was per ISO New England's own website details. And so as I've been saying, I think the dispatchable fuels, we've been hearing today as well, dispatchable fuels are critical to our region. And it's just a shame that we have the Marcellus Shale so close to us that could bring us cost-effective energy to the Northeast if we're able just to...

What would happen if you had... so we every time we talk about this, we get accused sometimes in this committee of, well, you're just here defending polluters is what they say. Well, these people aren't there to produce pollution, they're there to produce energy. What if you didn't have dispatchable power, the wind and... I mean the fossil fuels last Fern? What would have happened?

I mean, when you talk about pollution, if you look at natural gas, natural gas...

But if you didn't have natural gas, what would have happened?

If we didn't have natural gas?

If you didn't have that option.

It's... the generation there, it would just oil or most likely at this point, we would actually have outages.

Well, you wouldn't have oil either. So you'd have outages if you didn't have any of this, right? Because wind and solar wouldn't have... if you were 100 percent wind and solar, it wouldn't have performed.

That's correct.

Thank you. I yield back.

Thank you very much. The gentleman yields back and the chair now recognizes the gentleman from New Jersey, the ranking member of the full committee, for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My questions are of Mr. Goggin. Over the last 16 months, the Republicans keep repeating their claims that wind and solar are unreliable when the grid needs them most, but your testimony based on actual data kind of tells a different story. So can you talk about how renewables help keep the grid going during Winter Storm Fern and talk about how they performed relative to expectations?

Absolutely. In terms of total performance, wind and solar in the Southwest Power Pool region were about 20 to 27 percent during the peak demand periods. In ERCOT, it was in the Texas grid operating area, it was 15 to 24 percent. And in MISO, on the two peak days they had there during the peak hours, it was 23 percent. So very strong performance, over 20 percent on most of those days in most of those large markets. This also was well above the expected capacity, and that is really, I think, the important metric of what we're looking at. The grid is a product of decades of planning, and when those grid planners think about what generation will be there when power demand is high, that's the relative metric is how did you perform relative to what was expected of you and what, importantly, you are compensated to provide. Regions like PJM, MISO have capacity markets where resources get paid for the capacity they provide. And wind and solar outperformed that by a large margin, as I outlined. It was nearly twice, if you look across the SPP, MISO, and PJM areas, roughly twice what they were expected to provide and what they are compensated to provide. In contrast, gas and coal fell well below what they were compensated.

Well, that was my second question about, you know, this isn't just about renewables outperforming expectations, it's also about gas and coal-fired power plants underperforming. So tell me a little more, did thermal power plants, that is gas and coal, underperform during this extreme winter weather, and will they likely continue to struggle during future cold weather events?

Yes, they did, and we've seen this repeatedly in the events over the last several years and even over the last decade or more. There have been repeated correlated outages of fossil generation, coal and gas. For many of the coal units as well as some of the gas units, this is simply equipment failures, things breaking, things freezing, water pipes freezing like it might at your house when it's really cold. As I mentioned, these thermal resources need cooling water and they use water to produce steam. In many cases, that just creates more things that can freeze and break when it gets really cold. We also saw, you know, the gas supply issues are also a very real factor and were a major impact. In Fern, it wasn't large enough to cause rolling blackouts like we had in Uri and Elliott, but they still happened. It was 10 percent of production, U.S. natural gas production in Winter Storm Fern versus 20 percent in Winter Storms Elliott and Uri. And so we have these correlated risks because of those dependencies on a certain type of fuel or dependencies on things that use water and therefore are prone to certain types of failures. And so having more diversity, bringing in wind and solar that don't need fuel, that don't need water, gives you more diversity that protects against those risks.

All right. And then my last question is about your work on Winter Storm Fern. Throughout last year, Energy Secretary Wright, in my opinion, has illegally abused emergency authorities under the Federal Power Act repeatedly to force coal plants to stay online long after they were slated to retire. And so can you talk about how these so-called emergency orders drive up energy costs for ratepayers and are they actually necessary for reliability?

Absolutely. So these are plants that as part of that decadal planning process were slated for retirement. And that was a decision by the owner, by the utility, by the utility's regulators in many of these markets, and by the market forces that were sending a price signal to those units that you are no longer economic, the services you are providing are no longer valued, basically your cost is greater than your value and you should retire and you should be replaced with new, more economic, more reliable resources. And we saw that during this event. The performance of these coal units by DOE's own numbers was extremely poor. The numbers DOE put on its website show 29 to 42 percent consistent output from as a share of those resources' capacity during Winter Storm Fern. That's well below what the offshore wind and many of the land-based wind resources were providing, and it's certainly well below what grid operators expect from a coal generator.

So would you say, I'm just interrupting because I've run out of time, that you think that these emergency orders are necessary?

Absolutely not. The markets and the existing state regulatory processes are working well. They are providing the right price signals to bring market entry and replace these uneconomic, unreliable resources with new, more reliable resources. Intruding on that market and those regulatory processes is not going to benefit consumers.

I thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. The gentleman yields back and the chair now recognizes the gentleman from Alabama's sixth district for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Robb, I'm trying to think back to the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s when we had some pretty severe winter storms. My recollection is that most of the power outages that came from those were the result of trees or other things taking down lines, but it wasn't catastrophic grid failure. Do you have any knowledge of our past history and how our grid held up under winter storm conditions?

I have some, but I don't have personal experience all the way back to the '50s. However, I would say that in general, it's very unusual to see resource-driven outages. Most outages have always been because of problems on the distribution system due to icing on lines, people running into telephone poles, that sort or utility poles, that sort of thing. We're in a very unique period of time where we're seeing resource deficiency.

Why do you think that we're seeing that now? Is it because of the, as NERC pointed out a couple of years ago, the change in resource mix is the number one threat to the grid?

I think it's driven by a few things. I think the change in the resource mix is clearly one of the issues that we're seeing. We're just... we don't have the same fuel security we had in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. I think the weather systems that we're seeing are more extreme and more routinely extreme than what we've seen in the past.

I don't know that they're more extreme because we've known about polar vortexes since the 1850s. It was first identified as a polar vortex in a magazine that was... the editor was Charles Dickens. The most extreme event we had was in the early 1900s. And we actually, the event that took place in Texas was predicted weeks in advance because atmospheric scientists identified atmospheric conditions above the North Pole very similar to what happened in the 1920s when we had the super vortex. So I don't know that we've got more extreme events and I just think they... that we've changed the fuel mix, the resource mix, and we're... we've become reliant on things that I'm not sure are totally reliable. The question I'd like to ask Mr. Mattison, would reopening some of the facilities that have been closed, particularly the coal-fired facilities, and reopening those and powering those with small modular reactors mitigate some of the issues with reliability? Because the transmission lines are still there, you don't have the issue with transmission lines that you do with trying to build solar or wind.

Thank you for the question. And I would like to make a point when we talk about coal plants during winter events, we have long-term secured coal contracts, we have on-site fuel sitting on the ground. And I've heard a number of times that the cost to the customer on those coal-fired plants went up. I don't know how they calculate those numbers, but they did not go up. And so that fuel price is consistent. So I want to make sure that I noted that. If there's an area where you have an interconnection, where you have retired a plant, putting a plant back in that place, the interconnection still exists. Yes, sir, to your question, that would be very helpful.

But the issue isn't just extreme weather events, it's the fact that we've gone so whole hog toward renewables in certain areas of the country that they're now at high risk just based on demand.

Well, and I think it's math and it's a proper, you know, physics as well. We're not opposed to wind. If you look at our portfolio, we have a large portion of wind, we have a diversified portfolio and it complements and acts well at times. But you ask... Mr. Guthrie asked about dependability and reliability. I can rely on those dispatchable sources. And they hedge as an insurance policy. But again, our goal is to always keep the lights on for the consumer. That's what I'm tasked with as an operator.

Mr. Costa, you discussed the importance of gas reliability. What happens if the gas supply can't meet demand and what does a gas outage look like?

So in the Northeast, with the gas supply, it's you have gas utilities that have firm contracts. And as a result, at this point, if you take Winter Storm Fern, their customers were protected. It's really the power plants that do not have firm contracts and they're the ones that would suffer and then you would have lights out.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yield back.

Thank you. The gentleman yields back and the chair now recognizes the gentleman from New Jersey's eighth district for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Chairman. Today's hearing is on an important topic, but is being held at a time when Congress and this committee should be laser-focused on the affordability crisis that the Trump administration has exacerbated with the president's unauthorized war with Iran. A war that the American people have overwhelmingly opposed since its start. A war that goes directly against Trump's America First promise and pledge that he wouldn't start any new wars. Since the start of the year, our military operations have extended into Iran and Venezuela. It is only March, and this is actively making life more expensive for Americans. Last week, oil prices spiked to over $110 a barrel, the highest since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past month, oil prices have increased by almost 52 percent. Natural gas costs have increased 13 percent since the start of the Trump's second term and gasoline prices are up over 25 percent since the start of this year. This comes when the president asked about his performance on the economy and affordability gave himself an A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus, no room for improvement. Let's also remember that to mitigate this spike, the administration announced plans last week to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This is a strategy that both, yes, Republicans and Democratic administrations have used in the past, but when President Biden tapped into the reserve in response to rising oil prices following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a war that he did not start by the way, Republicans were outraged. Speaking about Russia, last week the administration announced a temporary waiver on U.S. sanctions on Russian oil, which means that Russia is now a direct beneficiary of the president's war on Iran. That is not an America First policy. Let's also rewind back to when the president... when President Biden was making these decisions. Colleagues on this committee, including the gentleman from Alabama, were up in arms saying President Biden has drained our SPR to the lowest level since the 1980s. Instead of draining our reserves for political motives, Biden should focus on reversing his administration's disastrous policies that have caused energy prices to skyrocket. Just once again, energy prices, natural gas costs have increased 13 percent since the start of Trump's term, and gasoline prices are up over 25 percent since the start of this year. I doubt you will see a tweet like this addressed to President Trump and his disastrous policies that are hurting the American people when they need relief from their government and an America First focus. We should be having the Secretary of Energy, Secretary Wright, before this committee, but he is tied up in Venezuela, which is, by the way, not the U.S. He is tied up on Iran, which again, is not the U.S. Everything that this administration is doing is running counter to all the promises that President Trump and Republicans on this committee ran on in 2024. So let's recap. Republicans were upset that President Biden tapped into the reserve, now President Trump is doing it. Republicans had the opportunity and President Trump had the opportunity to replenish that reserve, they failed to do so on an adequate level. And now the Strait of Hormuz is closed because of a war that Trump started, we are tapping into that reserve again to lower prices that have increased exponentially since the start of the war. By the way, the Strait of Hormuz was something that was obvious to anyone who studied the Middle East and this would be a response by the Iranian government, but not so much this administration. I say all this because this is an important issue in terms of what we've seen this year in storms and being prepared for it, our energy production in this country incredibly important. But when we sit here and our colleagues across the aisle pretend it's business as usual and we are not in this trying moment and the American people are not in this trying moment, it gets extremely frustrating, especially because so much of the time spent on this committee by my colleagues across the aisle are in constant critique of the prior administration, but when they see things that are hurting the American people being done by this administration, the lack of accountability of this administration, they're often silent. So I appreciate you all being here and I yield back.

Thank you, the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. The chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Tennessee's First District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for being here today and for your testimony. Winter Storm Fern was a real-world test of our electric grid for my home state. I'm proud of the men and women at TVA and our rural electric co-ops who worked around the clock in dangerous icy conditions to swiftly restore our power. And I'm sure you know the TVA's board recently announced it'll continue operations at the Cumberland and Kingston coal plants. That decision didn't just happen in a vacuum. As shared in Mr. Robb's testimony, NERC has sounded the alarm about early retirements in its 2025 long-term reliability assessment. And Winter Storm Fern showed us exactly why those warnings deserve our attention. When other resources underperformed during the storm, it was dispatchable generation that kept the lights on. And in the Tennessee Valley, coal alone provided 14 percent of our power generation at peak demand, solar and wind combined just provided one percent. So Mr. Mattison, what does Winter Storm Fern tell us about the role of dispatchable infrastructure, especially coal, in maintaining grid reliability, sir?

Thank you for your question. I think it's very important and when you look at how our assets performed during Winter Storm Fern, coal, they were at 81 percent of their capacity factor. When you look at wind, it was around 42 percent and natural gas was about 31 percent. So that dispatchable coal unit is the workhorse, it's the base load unit. And subject to check, but I believe I'm right here, AEP SWEPCO built the last coal plant that's been built in the United States. It's called the Turk plant in Fulton, Arkansas. It came online in 2012. It's an ultra-supercritical plant, which just means the temperatures are higher. And it, when built, complies with the current CCR, ELG rules and all the environmental rules that are available today. And it's one of the workhorses in our fleet and that plant performed perfectly during Winter Storm Fern.

Fantastic. I also want to mention how much our electric grid and pipeline network rely on significant preparation, scenario analysis, and real-time communication and coordination during these extreme weather events. Forecasting for severe weather and all possible outcomes can be very time-consuming and burdensome. I know I talked to the CEO of TVA when we had Hurricane Helene and I asked about AI projections and things of that nature. So Mr. Mattison, I'll go to you again. With the advent of AI and advanced computing, how can these tools be used to forecast potential supply shortfalls and demand increases and help respond to these events?

Well, thank you for your question. One thing I want to mention about AI in Northwest Louisiana, we just landed an Amazon data center that's going to be 1.2 gigs and we've got power plants in the offing to be built to support that that'll be fueled by natural gas. And I think it's early in the game to be precise on what AI can do, but it will be a game changer in predicting algorithms and forecasting fuel needed, weather patterns. The one thing about a Winter Storm Fern is like a hurricane. They can be devastating, but we have notice of when it's happening, so we can begin to gear up. But I see a future with AI when you put that data into an AI system, it will tell you exactly what you need to do, when to do it, how to do it. Kind of comical watching these driverless cars, I was in Austin yesterday and they were telling me that once they learn an algorithm, then they start driving more aggressively like those around them. So it's amazing I think what AI will be able to do for us.

Yeah, remind me not to take one of those. I'm pretty aggressive myself. Let's see, Mr. Robb, as more intermittent generation is added to the system, how important will reliable natural gas infrastructure be to maintaining grid stability during severe weather events?

Yeah, it's going to be critical to be able to balance the uncertainty in renewable production. One of the, one of the issues with renewables is that while they tend to perform well in the summer, they don't perform well in the winter in general. You know, the winter peaks typically happen at 6:00 in the morning and 8:00 at night, right when the sun doesn't shine. Batteries can help alleviate some of that, but not all of that, at least with the technologies we have today. So right now we need something to balance those resources and the only real fuel we have to do that that has the flexibility and the ubiquity is natural gas. So it's an essential fuel for reliability.

Thank you, sir. Mr. Mattison, you've talked about Amazon working, we have, I guess TVA has partnered with Google to do some innovative things for their data centers and won't cost the ratepayers anymore and you know, we're going to be checking on that, but this is going to happen all over the country. So with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

Thank you very much, the gentlelady yields back and the chair now recognizes the gentlelady from California's Seventh District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the witnesses for being here today. I want to be 100 percent clear, maintaining the reliability of the electric grid is our number one priority. When it comes to extreme cold or extreme heat, keeping the AC or heat running is a matter of life or death. Republicans want to accuse Democrats and clean energy advocates of undermining reliability. So I want to set the record straight. Nothing could be further from the truth. Climate change is an extreme threat to the grid, not to mention every other aspect of our lives. Wildfires are the biggest threat in California. They're also the biggest driver of electricity prices. And it's well-established that the severity and frequency of wildfires is increasing because of climate change. Hurricanes, another massive threat to grid reliability, are becoming stronger because of climate change. Extreme heat is becoming more common because of climate change. Even extreme cold like Winter Storm Fern can be linked to climate change. As climate change destabilizes Arctic weather patterns, extreme cold air can be pushed down into lower latitudes. Mr. Robb, NERC has acknowledged the impact of climate change on reliability. In the 2021 long-term reliability assessment and the 2022 state of reliability report, NERC stated that climate change is increasingly increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather, which is threatening reliability. Yes or no, is that correct?

I'd have to go back and look at the reports, but I don't doubt that.

Okay. NERC's mission is to conduct reliability assessments and establish reliability standards. Do you consider the role of fossil fuels in exacerbating the extreme weather that is threatening the grid?

I don't have an opinion on that.

Okay. Is it not NERC's mission to stop climate change at all?

No, our mission is to preserve the reliability of the bulk power system.

Okay. Our responsibility on this committee is to see the bigger picture and implement a long-term strategy to stop climate change while still maintaining everyday grid reliability. That is our job, and we're failing. These storms, heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods are only going to get worse if we don't do something about it. So how can we meet demand during winter storms without burning fossil fuels? 2026 was the coldest winter in decades for parts of the South and East Coast, but it was unusually warm for much of the West. Mr. Goggin, what was solar output like in the Western U.S. during Winter Storm Fern?

It was extremely good and power prices, as you noted, were quite low throughout the West during this event. And that reflects it was just not that cold there, so there was abundant supply, electricity demand was not that high, and the solar output was very strong. And so if we did have stronger transmission ties between the Eastern and the Western U.S. and between Texas and the East and the West, some of that surplus solar power and just general low-cost power in the West could have kept rates low, could have helped keep the lights on in the Eastern U.S. and Texas when those areas needed it. And we did see solar output...

Well, you answered my next question right now, so I'll continue here. In Sacramento, we don't get winter snowstorms like Fern, but we do deal with extreme heat waves that put serious strain on the grid. Six years ago, in 2020, extreme summer heat pushed California's grid to the breaking point, and we saw rolling blackouts across the state. But since then, California has dramatically improved the reliability of our grid despite facing similar heat waves. Mr. Goggin, can you talk about how California has achieved this stunning turnaround?

Absolutely. A big part of it is a diverse mix of resources and facilitating the transmission expansion that's necessary for that. And California has been procuring wind resources both in-state as well as from more distant areas where there's less diversity in the correlations of the profiles from those areas. So they're buying New Mexico wind, they're buying Wyoming wind, and this is building a diverse generation mix. In the state, obviously, there's a lot of solar investment, there's a lot of battery storage investment. And that is playing a key role. These three resources, wind, solar, batteries, work together extremely well to provide dependable capacity, flexibility, and to work with the existing resources as well as imports to meet reliability. And we're seeing the same thing play out in Texas and other areas where this is the winning solution is this diverse mix.

Mr. Goggin, you're answering my next question too, so we're going through this very quickly. But I just want to say since previous winter storms, Texas and other states have taken steps to winterize their grids and improve reliability safeguards. And two weeks ago, this committee passed the Secure Grid Act, which I co-authored with Chairman Latta to strengthen states' ability to assess and prepare for reliability risks. Mr. Robb, how important are state energy programs for driving reliability improvements?

They're absolutely critical because the states have the responsibility for the resource mix.

Okay. Thank you, and I ran out of time. I yield back.

Thank you very much. The gentlelady yields back, and the chair now recognizes the gentleman from Oregon's Second District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks all of you for being here. I think I want to start by focusing on the most simple approach, Mr. Robb, to the problems that we're facing and what we here in Congress can do about it. So you already mentioned that we have a shortage of generation. In the Northwest, I'm from Oregon, we anticipate a shortage of a massive amount of shortage for our area. About, we need about as much power in the future as we have today. And we need it really soon. So that means we have to double the amount that we have in the Northwest. So we have a real shortage there. Is this true across the nation, or is this just a Northwest problem?

It's not ubiquitous, but you're not alone. A lot of places are facing enormous load growth and the need to get new generation and supporting infrastructure in place.

Right. So let's, I was going to go to infrastructure next, and that would be transmission. And so when we just heard Mr. Goggin talking about the movement of wind and solar out of the Southwest up into California and into Oregon and so forth, that takes transmission. And we have an incredible problem with our transmission in the Northwest. Problem in the sense that it's too small, it's full up, there's no more capacity. Is that correct across the nation?

Again, not ubiquitous, but that problem is fairly common.

And so now we're getting to it. How do we solve these two problems, one on the generation side and one on the transmission side? What is it going to take to solve these two problems?

Main thing is we've got to figure out how to get stuff built, right? I mean, grid planners understand where there's need for more transmission, they understand where there's need for resources. The issue is getting permits to build it, getting through the interconnection queues where that's an obstacle, dealing with supply chain bottlenecks to get the equipment to build the stuff. But we've got to be able to get it put in place, and we've got to get it put in place very quickly.

We do. And let's focus on those obstacles again because you're here in front of Congress. The idea is that you'll tell us what it is we need to do to try to address the very obstacles that are standing between us and getting that generation and that transmission. So let's talk about transmission first. Is it the environmental work that we have to do to put a power line in that's the problem, or is there some other or additional problem? Because certainly the EIS and everything else is a problem.

That question probably would be better addressed by one of the people who actually build transmission, because we don't. But the issue is permitting it.

Of the three we have here, who should I ask?

I'd ask Mr. Mattison.

Mr. Mattison, you're up.

I'm going to throw him a question in a minute. But that's okay. No, we do build transmission lines, and I agree with Mr. Robb. We do need to streamline the processes. As I said earlier, the states have done a very good job of expediting permitting. But when you start going across transmission lines interstate, if we would have a more robust federal policy...

So let's go to this. Every time I hear the word robust, I start to nod off. Let me just say that we just had a vote on the SPEED Act. And the SPEED Act vote was 221 to 196. Eleven Democrats joined the rest of all but one Republican voting for that. It hasn't gone anywhere over in the Senate. If that were to pass, would that help?

Yes. Let's interchange the word for robust to speed, and that would help us from expedited, and that's what we need.

And so if we're going to actually solve these problems that we've heard about for the last several hours, we actually need to do something to reduce the amount of time it's going to take to get generation, to get transmission. So you're saying the SPEED Act would help?

Yes.

And yet it's not moving in the Senate. So you're telling Congress, do something with the SPEED Act. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yes, sir.

And so if the SPEED Act were to pass, would that help us address these almost existential problems that we're facing without having enough power to bring about artificial intelligence?

It would build a highway. I like to look at it like this transmission system that we're talking about in Oregon is a two-lane highway. We need a 10-lane highway to be able to move bulk power. No matter what the generation source is, we can't move it right now.

And we've created these laws and requirements and studies and standards and everything else that are standing between us and actually getting done what has to be done to help protect this nation as we go into this electrically driven future. Thank you so much all for being here. I yield back.

Well, thank you very much. The gentleman yields back, and the chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas's 33rd District for five minutes for questions.

Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Now that we know that extreme weather is no longer just an occasional stress test for our grid, that's become sort of a routine operating condition, we need to be cognizant of that. I know that Winter Storm Fern was the third major winter event in as many years, and it forced grid operators across much of the country to manage simultaneous spikes in electricity demand, fuel constraints, and infrastructure stress. The encouraging news is that the bulk power systems pretty much held together. Grid operators learned a lot of lessons. I know we did in Texas at ERCOT with Winter Storm Uri and Elliott, like improved weather forecasting and better coordination and more clear-eyed planning to help keep flowing during peak demand. But Fern also reinforced something that is also I think equally important, and that is there's no single resource or technology that guarantees reliability. Cleaner energy provided meaningful generation and helped limit operating costs during periods of extremely high fuel prices. And natural gas supplies faced price spikes and delivery challenges, and local outages were often caused by distribution infrastructure failures rather than generation shortages. And so we have to move beyond fuel versus fuel debates. I think that that's unfortunately become almost sort of comical here. But every resource type definitely has distinct outage risk during extreme weather. And I want to focus my questions on what policies actually reduce risk and lower cost going forward. Mr. Goggin, analysis shows that cleaner energy helped reduce operating costs during Winter Storm Fern when fuel prices surged. And so I wanted to ask you to what extent can renewable generation act as a hedge against fuel price shocks that ultimately show up in consumer bills?

Absolutely. It's an extremely powerful hedge because wind and solar have no fuel cost. They will always be free. And that's something that you can't get with other resources. Gas is obviously mostly traded on the spot market, and so the price can be extremely volatile during short-term emergencies like we saw with Winter Storm Fern, as well as long-term just with geopolitical and other macroeconomic factors that are uncertain. And so wind and solar does not have that risk, and it gives you a valuable hedge as a ratepayer that some of your fuel price is known and locked in at zero. So that's extremely valuable, and I think it's been a big part of the solution in Texas with the massive amount of wind, solar, and batteries they have built, particularly over the last several years.

Does over-reliance on a single fuel create affordability and reliability risk at the same time?

Absolutely. You see these correlated risks. Each fuel has some types of risk, some are economic, some are reliability. And the solution to those risks is to have a diverse portfolio so that if one resource is unavailable or is too expensive, you can use the other resources. And that diversity, I think, not putting all of your eggs in one basket is an extremely smart way to plan a generation system. And you need the transmission system that also enables that, allows you to access diverse resources within your region as well as from neighboring regions. So generation and transmission diversity is really key.

Thank you very much. And I wanted to ask Mr. Robb, I know that Winter Storm Fern saw some natural gas price spike nearly 10 to 35 times at major hubs. And given the gas-electric coordination risk identified by NERC, how can we better align the two, these two industries to ensure that fuel is available when the grid needs it most?

That's a great question. First of all, we need to recognize that these two systems are two sides of the same coin, right? Natural gas now supplies 45 percent of power generation fuel, and power generation consumes about 45 percent of natural gas. So first thing I would say is we need to figure out how to plan these two systems together. Right now they're planned independently on different bases. Second, we need to address the disconnects between the realities of fuel procurement for the power sector, which are very, very different than the fuel procurement needs of a local distribution company for home heating. One of the issues we ran into in Fern was just the duration from when the operators needed to make their gas buy versus when they actually purchased the gas. It was five or six days, that's an eternity. That needs to be addressed. Third, we need better coordinating mechanisms between the two sectors. That's being addressed in some ways voluntarily by the initiatives that Jose discussed in the Northeast. We see similar things in other parts of the country. And then finally, the gas system needs to be able to perform during extreme weather to the same degree that we require the electric system to perform. That's going to require more infrastructure, both pipelines and storage, and probably some requirements on the pipelines and the upstream production to make sure that they can continue to operate during extreme cold events.

Thank you very much. Mr. Chairman, I yield back. Thank you.

Thank you. The gentleman yields back. The chair now recognizes the gentlelady, the at-large member from North Dakota for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to my colleague from Florida for allowing me to jump ahead of her for these questions. This is like the Super Bowl of hearings for me. I'm a former utility regulator. These issues that we're talking about today are what drove me to run for Congress because I saw the reliability risks front and center as president of NARUC, as a state utility regulator for 12 years, and was frustrated that we weren't shining enough light on these issues and paying enough attention to them. So Mr. Robb and I have worked together for years. I appreciate your focus on this. I want to highlight something that you said, Mr. Robb. Fern was a classic near-risk event. Near-risk event. I wonder how different the room would be today if it wasn't a near-risk event. If things had gone just a little bit differently. I can estimate what it would be like in here. It would be packed, and all of us would be really mad at all of you because somebody else, not us, would be to blame. That's what happens with this. The engineers come through like champs in the hour of our greatest need, and they figure it out until they don't. But guess what? We have been warned. Your report time and time again, year after year from NERC, has been warning this country that we're at risk of not having enough power to meet demand. Two-thirds of the country is at risk of not having enough power to meet demand. That's not acceptable. We have to do better. So I appreciate you guys being here today and sharing some of your wisdom on what we should be doing better. Mr. Mattison, you mentioned that you'd like the federal government, I'm paraphrasing, you'd like the federal government to pay more attention to reliability and to demand more of the system as it relates to reliability through our policies. What would you like us to do?

Well, as I was talking to Mr. Bentz, I think, and Mr. Robb said it many times, we need to build stuff. At the end of the day, we need to build transmission lines, bulk transmission lines. We need to expedite that. It's needed today. We need to win at this AI game. We really do as a United States. They're happening all over the place. They'll go somewhere else. We want them here. To me, it's a matter of national security. So to be able to build out to that demand, we can't haggle around with policies that ought to be this way, that way. To me, it ought to be a bipartisan solution because the whole country's dependent on building out the infrastructure that we need, because the reality is, it's pretty simple. The lights will go out if we don't do this.

Right. I agree with you. Should be bipartisan. Mr. Robb, how are premature retirements of base load resources such as natural gas and coal making matters worse when we have increased demand?

Thanks for the question. It makes matters worse in a number of different ways. One, you lose the energy production associated with those facilities. And we saw in Winter Storm Fern a number of the facilities that were operating under 202c orders did perform and were required to keep the to keep the lights on. There's no question about that. The second thing is that those facilities create the special sauce that keeps the grid operating. They create frequency, they create voltage, they create the ability to control those within very tight parameters, which is what allows the high voltage transmission system to operate. Without that kind of generation, we don't have the ability to operate a transmission system of the scale that we have. We may eventually be able to do that with grid-forming inverters and other technologies, but those aren't ready for prime time yet. So they play a very, very essential role in the reliability of the grid.

Thank you. In the past, I've heard you say that one of the easiest things that we should be doing in the country to address our current urgent needs is to stop retiring things that are already connected to the grid and working. Do you still believe that that would be a good first step?

I think the way to get out of a hole is to stop digging. And to the extent that some of these plants have remaining valuable life, they should be continuing to operate. That's not to say that there aren't some plants that probably need to go, right, because they haven't been maintained and they're not ready to not ready to operate. But that's not the characteristic of the entire fleet.

Thank you. I thank you all for what you're doing, and I yield back, Mr. Chairman.

The gentlelady yields back. And the chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Virginia's Fourth District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the witnesses for being here for this very important hearing. The reliability of the nation's grid and our ability to maintain a stable and robust supply of energy during extreme weather events and disasters, both natural and man-made, is extremely important to our overall national security. Unfortunately, what I've heard from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle is the same myth that only fossil fuels can serve as reliable sources of energy, and that renewable energy does not have a place in ensuring the stability of our grid. But that is simply not true. As painfully demonstrated by President Trump's unauthorized war of choice in Iran, conflict in one part of the globe can dramatically disrupt the movement of fossil fuels everywhere and send the price of oil and natural gas into the stratosphere. This fossil fuel reliance undermines our national security and threatens the stability of our grid. As things are now, in order to recklessly balance his addiction to fossil fuels with his duty to the American people to keep energy costs affordable, President Trump has eased sanctions on Russia just to try and keep energy prices from continuing their meteoric rise. And Secretary Becerra has said the Trump administration is fine with Iran exporting almost one billion barrels of oil while other oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains paralyzed. In other words, we are now funding the world's largest exporters of global instability and chaos just to maintain a semblance of energy stability. This is only exacerbated by the actions of my colleagues across the aisle who have sat idly by while the administration zealously undermined the clean energy transition and worked to kill dozens of clean energy projects and hundreds of billions in clean energy tax credits that would have made our grid more resilient to the current supply disruptions that are affecting the globe because of the president's senseless war. Now, Mr. Goggin, in your testimony, you note that natural gas, I'm sorry, that question's actually already been answered, so I'm going to skip. You highlighted in your testimony that renewable energy projects account for 92 percent of power generation resources that are trying to interconnect to the grid. Can you discuss how we should work to expedite that interconnection process and what the benefits of doing so would be for the reliability and stability of the grid?

Absolutely. Transmission is one of the key bottlenecks in getting new generation of all types onto the grid. And we do see, as you mentioned, a large amount of wind, solar, and battery capacity is stuck in this interconnection logjam. And moving transmission forward is, you know, building things is, I think everybody here has said, is really the key solution. And we talk about the three Ps in terms of driving transmission: planning, paying, and permitting. Planning is easy. You can just draw lines on a map. Figuring out who pays for transmission, developing regional workable cost allocation methods to pay for transmission is a key impediment in most regions. And then finally, permitting is obviously something that the federal government as well as state governments can work together to achieve, and that allows transmission lines to be built and permitted in an expeditious way. And that will give us, basically open up the market, let these resources that are trying to get onto the grid move forward. And wind, solar, batteries can be deployed very quickly. You can build them in a year or less, much faster than any other form of generation. And so they are extremely valuable as we have this large load growth going on now.

And speaking of permitting, I guess it doesn't help once permits are awarded if the administration pauses the construction of a wind project for no apparent reason.

That does not help.

Thank you. And Mr. Goggin, previous witnesses to this committee have highlighted that increased renewable energy generation provides an opportunity to significantly update aging and outdated parts of the grid as we seek to ensure that these new sources of energy are able to seamlessly integrate into the grid. Can you speak to the necessity of updating aging grid infrastructure?

Absolutely. It's something we need to be investing in anyway. Most of our power grid was built 40 plus years ago. It's now reaching the end of its life, and there's opportunities to rebuild that at higher capacity using modern technology, advanced conductors, and other things that give you a lot more capacity with a similar profile in land use. And so there's a lot of opportunities to do that. And that's why we talk about we need proactive multi-value transmission. Recognizing that transmission is not just needed to bring new generation on, it's not just needed for new loads. It provides economic value, it provides reliability value, it provides, FERC has identified seven benefits, distinct categories of benefits of transmission. And so we need to be thinking as we're replacing our aging assets on the grid, how can we maximize those seven categories of benefits across economics, reliability, resilience, all of that ultimately flows to the ratepayers. And so yes, we need to be thinking about all of that and investing at a level that's commensurate with those benefits. We are woefully short of that today.

Perfect timing. I yield back.

Thank you very much. The gentlelady yields back. The chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Florida's 15th District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. During Winter Storm Fern, Florida saw snow flurries as far south as my district in Hillsborough County, with temperatures dropping down into the 30s. That's unusual for us back home. Destroying over $3.81 billion worth of crops across Florida. [Coughing.]

Okay, the gentlelady will informally pass and come back to the gentlelady, and the chair will recognize the gentleman from South Carolina's Seventh District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today. Reliable energy is essential to every aspect of our modern life, especially to public health and our welfare. Yet power outages have cost the American people $44 billion each year. Winter Storm Fern highlighted the importance of grid reliability, leaving more than one million customers without power at its peak, including 70,000 in my home state of South Carolina. These disruptions make it clear that reliability must remain a top priority, particularly during severe weather events that place extraordinary strain on the electric system. Winter Storm Fern also demonstrated the critical importance of dispatchable energy sources. During the storm, peak coal generation rose by 25 percent and peak natural gas generation rose by 47 percent. Across all impacted regions, dispatchable energy significantly outperformed wind and solar generation. The grid's performance during severe weather depends not only on these base load and dispatchable resources, but also on real-time coordination among grid operators, generators, transmission owners, marketers, and other market participants. Analyzing how the bulk power system performs during these events is essential, I think, to strengthening reliability and ensuring the continued delivery of electric power that Americans depend on every day. Mr. Costa, during Winter Storm Fern, natural gas generation played a significant role in meeting peak electricity demand. Importantly, natural gas storage infrastructure is necessary to protect against potential capacity constraints or pipeline failures that limit supply. Can you discuss how your areas utilized natural gas storage to ensure fuel delivery and availability during the storms?

Yes. So, thank you for the question, Congressman. One thing I want to note is that also to your questions that in the Northeast, in the power generation sector, over 20 percent, and Mr. Robb will probably have the exact number, of generators are actually natural gas. Those generators went offline, and that's the reason we saw the hike. But when we did have the Marcellus Shale perform extremely well this winter with winterization efforts, but we did see some of the areas with that, and storage was a big player this year in being able to, and those are firm contracts that utilities have to be able to pull from when needed, and storage was a big player this year in making sure that we were able to get the supply we needed.

Yeah, there was a lot of preparation and coordination leading up to and during the storm among members of the power and gas sectors. This included the administration taking proactive steps to issue 202(c) orders to enable maximum availability of dispatchable coal and gas and backup generation if it was needed. It also included longer-term adjustments like winterization, obviously. To Mr. Robb, Mr. Mattison, and Mr. Costa, how did planning and actions taken during Fern reflect lessons from past storms? Additionally, can you all speak to any existing coordination practices between pipelines, generators, and grid operators that could expand to further strengthen that reliability during extreme weather? We'll start, we'll go down here. Yes, sir.

So, following a 2018 cold weather event, we started the process of developing mandatory reliability standards related to winterization. Those were approved by FERC last year, will be mandatory and enforceable next year. Many of the power generating units kind of leaned in and have gotten ahead of the enforcement date and have taken steps to winterize their equipment against very, very extreme cold temperatures, which is again one of the things we defined with FERC. I think the efforts around coordination, and that helped, that's one of the reasons why we believe that's one of the reasons we didn't see the same number of generation outages in Fern that we did in Elliott and Uri is because of those winterization requirements. In terms of coordination between the two sectors, the AGA, the American Gas Association, last year initiated a series of regional forums to drive better situational awareness between the two sectors, better understand the vulnerabilities. I participated in one of those events in the Pacific Northwest, and those are desperately needed relationships that need to be automated and activated in real time so that the grid operators know what's going on in the gas system and vice versa because they're so interdependent.

Mr. Mattison.

Well, one thing we did is what Mr. Robb said is we prepared for winter, especially Uri taught us a lesson with putting heat tracing and things of that nature in our gas power plants. We did winterization of our coal plants to meet those requirements. And the second thing that we did is we always practice any type of weather event. And so in October, we went through a full-blown two-day practice session, and it's ironic, it basically mirrored what Fern did. So everybody was on point and we had practiced, rehearsed, so that helped us tremendously.

Mr. Costa, you're off the hook because he...

I'm sorry, the gentleman's time has expired. And if you want to respond to him written, we'd greatly appreciate that. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from California's 15th District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As of yesterday, the cost of crude oil had gone up 50 percent in less than two weeks. The average price of gas hit $3.72 a gallon. Americans are already paying the price for Trump's reckless and chaotic war in Iran. So it's disappointing to hear the same tired arguments about tying our electric system to these volatile markets. When gas pipelines froze during Winter Storm Uri a few years ago, energy prices spiked in Texas, and some families were hit with catastrophic electric bills of over $10,000. Today, we're faced with similar unpredictability, although this time of our own making as a result of an unnecessary war. If we double down on fossil fuels, Americans will continue to be at the mercy of foreign wars and industry price gouging. So, Mr. Goggin, your testimony notes that in every recent winter storm, the natural gas accounted for the majority of the generator outages. Can you describe how diverse sources of power, including renewables, protect consumers from the massive oil price spikes we are seeing, not least due to this war?

Absolutely. There's both the reliability and resilience benefit as well as an economic benefit. And Winter Storm Fern luckily was not a, did not appear, did not result in a reliability event. We did not have rolling blackouts like we did during Winter Storms Elliott and Uri. However, the risk is still there. If it was a colder event, I think we could have seen the loss of gas generation at the levels that we saw in those previous events, and that could have pushed things over the edge. Fern was, however, an economic event. We will see rates go up dramatically for ratepayers to cover those fuel costs, the billions of dollars that were expended, particularly on natural gas when it spiked to over 100 times normal in some places. These are extreme pricing events and they are going to have a large impact on ratepayers. And so having a diverse mix of wind and solar and battery resources that do not have that fuel price exposure, do not have that exposure to the fuel supply delivery interruptions, that is extremely valuable for both economics and reliability.

Thank you for that. And Mr. Robb, your organization's 2024 report found that America needs 35 gigawatts of new interregional transmission to keep the grid reliable. Can you elaborate on that finding and describe how it may have shifted given increasing energy demand since that study was finalized?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the 35 gigawatts was identified as opportunities to better use the reserve base of the country by sharing reserves during extreme events. It did not examine every opportunity to do that. It looked at transmission as the solution to that. That's just important to note. The question as to how things have evolved given the demand forecast, the load growth that's happened because that study was vintage to 2023 data, is a great one. I honestly can't tell you how it changes because areas that were deficient that showed deficiency probably are showing more deficiency. Areas that might have been able to export may also be in deficiency now because of the load growth. Really, the analytics would have to be done to ascertain whether that number is higher or lower today.

Worthy of further exploration. So thank you all for your testimony today, and with that, I yield back.

Thank you very much. The chair will again recognize the gentlelady from Florida's 15th District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I'm going to try this again. Thank you all so much for being here with us today. During Winter Storm Fern, Florida saw snow flurries as far south as my district in Florida, which had really damaging impacts on our agriculture industry. And during the storm, the Department of Energy issued seven emergency orders to mitigate the risk of blackouts in Florida. Backup generation was leveraged to stabilize the grid, ensuring more than 100 different local entities, including critical services, could maintain power. While today's hearing focuses on Winter Storm Fern, the lesson is broader. In Florida, we tend to face hurricanes rather than winter storms, but the challenge is the same: ensuring that our grid can withstand extreme events and deliver reliable power when Americans need it most. Mr. Robb, I'd like to start by coming back to you. NERC's reliability assessments have warned about growing risks to the bulk power system as demand increases and dispatchable resources retire. In Florida, our utilities spend significant resources hardening the grid for hurricanes, strengthening poles, putting lines underground, preparing for rapid restoration. But generation reliability is just as critical for us during these extreme events. Based on NERC's analysis of Winter Storm Fern and other severe weather events, what lessons should policymakers be keeping in mind to ensure the grid maintains sufficient dispatchable generation and reliability during extreme weather events like hurricanes?

Yeah, that's a super question. You know, one of the things that's very unique about Florida that we really admire is the fact that your natural gas generation fleet and the natural gas system in Florida is purpose-built largely for the generation business. We think there's a really important lesson learned there relative to the dual-purpose gas system we have in the rest of the country where it has to serve both local distribution load for home heating as well as the power sector. I think the planning of the grid, both the power sector and the natural gas sector in Florida, have significantly improved the resilience of that system for the benefit of Floridians.

And are you seeing any particular reliability concerns in regions experiencing rapid population growth where electricity demand increases? I know my district has three of the fastest-growing counties in the country. Does that affect your assessment and issues related to reliability?

Yeah, absolutely, because as the population migrates, so does load, right? And we've seen big migration into Florida and into Texas in particular, and it's one of the drivers of our characterization of Texas as an elevated or high-risk area of the country.

Thank you. And Mr. Costa, you said something earlier during the hearing. You noted that during Winter Storm Fern, the weather-dependent sources failed to meet the moment. Tell us a little bit more about that failure to meet the moment and what we should be thinking about to ensure that we prevent that type of situation in the future.

Well, thank you for the question. And I think it's been said earlier today and we agree that all energy sources have a place. But when it came to Winter Storm Fern, it was evident that renewable sources weren't there. It was the dispatchable fuels like natural gas, nuclear, and in this case, oil that really took the moment and ensured that we kept the lights on.

And Mr. Mattison, Secretary Wright has argued that a more levelized demand profile, where electricity demand is kept stable throughout the day, could help reduce costs by minimizing the need to ramp power plants up and down throughout the day. From an operator's perspective, could you explain how policies that encourage more consistent electricity demand might help reduce prices for consumers?

Yeah, well, right now what we have is what I think what he's talking about and you're referring to is when there's peak demands, it's usually between in our service territory 1:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. like in the summertime or wintertime, that's when the most consumption is. We have a very good energy efficiency program in all three of our jurisdictions to encourage a better use and utilization of the energy dollar that a customer spends. That's one way. Also, making sure that you have a diversified mix in your portfolio, I think's important. You're not putting all your eggs in one basket. So I look at our portfolio and it's done this way on purpose where we have coal, we have natural gas, we also have wind resources. And so at any point in time during the day, one of those is going to be a little less expensive than the other. So we use what's called economic dispatch through our regional transmission organization, and I think that's something that has proven to be very cost-conscious for our consumers and we need to continue with that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

Thank you very much. The gentlelady yields back. The chair now recognizes the gentlelady from Iowa's First District for five minutes for questions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Castor for holding this important hearing on the lessons learned from recent Winter Storm Fern, which was one of the few winter storms that did not affect Iowa to the degree it affected the Southeast. But Winter Storm Fern showed us an uncomfortable truth about our grid. This is not a picture of a confident, well-planned system. It's a picture, as Mr. Robb had said, of a system boxed in by infrastructure decisions made years ago. Prolonged cold, high demand, and regional fuel constraints all arrived at once, and in many ways, the grid performed better than in past events because of years of winterization and hard lessons from Yuri and Elliott. The lesson from Fern is that we're asking more of a grid in every region and increasingly relying on emergency tools and extraordinary coordination to navigate conditions that are becoming more common, not more rare. And at the same time, we've layered on emergency orders, special directives, and broad must-run orders that in some regions effectively over-procured generation and crashed prices. Those tools helped us through Fern, but they're not a sustainable business model for a grid that's about to serve even larger loads. Data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrification on many levels of our economy are driving demand up quickly. Yet building the infrastructure to serve that demand, modern gas plants and nuclear storage, new pipelines, transmission lines, or any renewable source, which Iowa does have, takes years longer than it should. Not because technology is unproven, but because our permitting pathways are slow, fragmented, and unpredictable. When we fail to build, everyone in the system has less room to maneuver when the weather turns. My aim today is to connect those dots. If we want a grid that can meet historic load growth without lurching from one emergency order to the next, we need to reform permitting so that necessary projects can be built on timelines that match the needs of households, businesses, and critical institutions. Mr. Robb, during Fern, we saw heavy use of emergency authorities and operator alerts. From your perspective, are we beginning to normalize emergency actions because we have under-built the system?

I certainly hope not, but I believe in the situations that we found in Fern and will probably find in the next two or three winters, we are probably going to have to rely on those kinds of actions until we get the grid up to scratch to deal with the situations on their own.

And looking back at Winter Storm Fern, if the projects currently stuck in interconnection queues and permitting processes had been in service, how different would the system's risk profile have been?

It would have been better, but I couldn't say by how much. One of the issues we're seeing is that even when things clear the queue, the interconnection queue, it still takes a long time for them to get built, and in many cases, they don't get built at all. And that's true for projects that have strong state sponsorship as well. So the interconnection queue is increasingly a hurdle, but it's not sufficient to count on that generation showing up in a certain timeframe.

So it's difficult to quantify how much of our near-miss problem is a build-out problem.

Yeah, that's said much more eloquently.

Mr. Costa, you note that pipelines were issuing customer-specific operational flow orders to generators during Fern. Can you walk us through what those OFOs look like in practice, who got curtailed first, how much notice they had, and what that meant for gas-only generators versus dual-fuel units in New England and New York?

There was constant communication going on, and that's part of the collaboration that took place during Winter Storm Fern, especially with the pipelines, with the producers, ISOs, and all the way down to the generators. And the goal was to ensure to keep them on as long as they could without them taking more than they should so it wouldn't hurt the home heating customers. It just got to a point where they ended up shutting down the, especially the dual-fuel ones so they can go on oil, but unfortunately also the gas-only generators who could get gas from Marcellus Shale if we put pipelines in the ground were not able to get gas.

There are so many questions we could certainly ask about this, but in a state that has a myriad of generation of electricity and power from numerous sources and having visited MISO, let me just ask you, Mr. Robb, as the FERC representative. So when we have rules or legislation that is taking generation offline without addressing the need for how we're bringing generation online, and I'm referring specifically to Power Plant 2.0 under the past administration and the tailpipe emission rule, which is rapidly developing electric vehicles. So we're taking energy offline and increasing demand for energy, and that's even without data centers and advanced manufacturing. How much stress does that put on the grid and reliability?

And I'm sorry to say that the gentlelady's time has expired, but if you could answer in a written statement back to the gentlelady, we would appreciate that. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Colorado's 8th District for five minutes of questions.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member. Thank you, of course, to all of the witnesses for coming today. As my colleagues on this committee and my constituents back in Colorado's 8th Congressional District know, I'm a strong advocate for all of the above energy because we have it all. Four percent of U.S. crude comes out of my district, but we also have one in two wind generators are made in my district, some of the biggest solar projects, geothermal, battery, the last vestiges of what used to be nuclear generation in Colorado. So we need to have that because we know what the statistics say. We're going to need more power on the grid. I think it's 165 gigawatts more in the next four years than we currently generate right now. There's a right way to do wind and solar and variables, and unfortunately, what the ruling Democrats in my home state in Colorado have done is the absolute wrong way to do it, which is one-size-fits-all heavy-handed government mandates. They've declared war on coal and oil and gas production in pursuit of their truly unattainable net-zero goals. And as states around the country have been investing in growing their generation, Colorado has actually declined in how much electricity they're producing. We made 2,000 gigawatt hours less electricity last year than the year before that. And as we all know, when the supply goes down, the costs go up. And so my first question, this is just going to be a yes-no question to the entire panel. Do state mandates that remove dispatchable energy from generation portfolios build more reliable and affordable grids or less reliable and affordable grids? So I guess yes is more reliable and no is it's less reliable. So yes or no question. We'll just start at the left.

I would say no.

No.

It depends what you're replacing it with.

No.

Thank you. And Mr. Goggin, thank you for the answer. I just want to point you to a previous quote that you have, which is, quote, "a diverse generation mix increases resilience," which I would assume includes oil, gas, coal.

It depends on what you have already. If you have a lot of that, then more diverse would be less of that. You'd be bringing in other things. It depends on what you have.

So there's a place for oil, gas, and coal.

It depends on what you have on your generation mix. And if you have, you know, some places have abundant hydro.

So if you have, so there's a place for oil and gas and coal on that generation mix.

It depends on what resources you have.

Okay. Well, I think a diverse generation mix includes oil, gas, and coal. So thank you for that. To Mr. Robb, NERC's long-term reliability assessment mentions the significant consequences of retiring fossil fuel generation at a pace that energy providers and the supply chain can't keep up with. In 2025, Colorado was responsible for retiring 10 percent of the country's dispatchable base load power despite producing only two percent and actually, as we just heard, declining in producing two percent of the nation's power. And so my question to you, what impact does the premature retirement of coal plants and other base load dispatchable energy like natural gas, what does that have on electricity costs for ratepayers?

So we don't do the economic analysis of what it means for rates, so be clear on that. But it doesn't bode well because we're replacing generally older depreciated assets and bringing on high fixed cost assets at a time of relatively high interest rates. So I can't do the math in terms of in my head as to whether it's higher or lower, but it's certainly putting pressure on affordability.

What about reliability? Can you speak to reliability?

I can definitely speak to reliability. The benefits of having what I call spinning mass generation, stuff that kind of generates power the old-fashioned way, from a reliability perspective based on the grid we have right now is absolutely essential. And one of the things that concerns us about the retirements is that we're losing spinning mass generation and we're replacing it with power electronic-based generation that doesn't behave the same way. And one of the things that concerns us about the retirements is that we're losing spinning mass generation and we're replacing it with power electronic-based generation that doesn't behave the same way.

Got it. That makes perfect sense to me because of what we've seen happen in Colorado. Fortunately, I have some statistics that I can mention about reliability. The ruling Democrats in Colorado and their drive for this net-zero variable power only is going to cost our state $61 billion. That's not my statistic, that's the Colorado Energy Office's statistic. And we know that if utility providers have to go funnel $61 billion into these failed policies, they can't upgrade the grid, they can't invest in reliable generation. We've seen the results in Colorado. Just this week, we had to do our fourth power shut-off because we don't have a reliable grid in Colorado. Not the fault of the utilities, that's the fault of the mandates coming from the ruling state Democrats, and I am out of time, so I will yield back to the chair.

Thank you very much. The gentleman yields back. And the chair, seeing no other members wishing to ask questions, I want to thank our witnesses for appearing before us today. And our members may have additional questions for you, and I remind members that they have 10 business days to submit additional questions for the record. And I ask the witnesses to do your best to respond within 10 business days of receipt of those questions. I ask unanimous consent to insert in the record the documents included on the staff hearing documents list. Without objection, so ordered. And without objection, the subcommittee is adjourned.

Testing one, two, three, one, two, three, four. Nothing. Try it again. Testing one. Testing one, two, three. No. Check it. Nothing. Testing one, two. No. Testing one, two, testing one, two, three. Okay, I think it's working now. Ready? Yeah. Testing one, two, three. Testing one, two. Okay, so we've got that. Let me try it one more time just to make sure. Okay. This is a test. Energy and Commerce will begin shortly, room 2123. Yeah. This is the witness mic. Testing.