DOE warns of heightened risk of blackouts in the US

The US Department of Energy has issued a stark and unprecedented warning, signaling a 100-fold increase in the risk of major power outages by 2030, amid the planned retirement of more than 100 gigawatts of power generation capacity, according to an article published by Zerohedge. The alarm bell came on the same day that President Donald Trump signed a new executive order aimed at strengthening the country's energy security, ending policies that, in his opinion, have undermined the reliability of the American energy system.

According to a report prepared and published by the Department of Energy, the elimination of 104 gigawatts of grid-connected power capacity based on coal, natural gas and nuclear power, without replacing them properly and in a timely manner, could lead to massive power outages, especially when weather conditions do not allow the exploitation of intermittent sources, such as wind and solar. According to official modeling, annual hours of outage could explode from the current single-digit level to more than 800 hours per year, affecting millions of households and businesses in the United States. In this context, the report denounces the radicalism of the environmental agenda promoted by previous administrations, accusing it of hastening the withdrawal of reliable sources without providing adequate replacements, especially as the United States registers an upward trend in energy demand, a trend driven by the expansion of data centers powered by artificial intelligence, industrialization and the relaunch of domestic manufacturing.

Despite current plans to add a total of 209 gigawatts of electricity capacity by 2030, the DOE says only 22 projects are confirmed at this point, which American experts say represents an imbalance that risks seriously destabilizing the national electricity grid.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the US can no longer afford to continue on this unstable and dangerous path, which has led to the accelerated closure of coal- and natural gas-fired generation capacity. The Trump administration official stressed that the US reindustrialization and the global race for supremacy in artificial intelligence require a much larger volume of reliable energy, available around the clock.

Concerns about energy vulnerability are not isolated: a report published in May by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that some regions of the US could face serious difficulties meeting energy demand this summer, again calling into question the reliability of renewable sources.

In a decisive move away from the environmental policies of the past, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the same day as the DOE report was published, aimed at eliminating subsidies for unreliable energy sources controlled by foreign actors. The order calls for the cancellation of tax credits for solar and wind energy production and investment and calls for changes to rules that give preferential treatment to these technologies at the expense of firm and dispatchable energy sources.

The White House has argued that reliance on wind and solar power compromises the stability of the power grid, reduces energy affordability for citizens, and damages the nation's natural landscape, while supply chains dominated by foreign adversaries threaten national security itself.

Some of these renewable energy policies are already being dismantled after the passage of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" on Independence Day. The bill eliminates a series of clean energy tax credits established by former President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, effective as early as this year. For example, the electric vehicle tax credit will expire by the end of September, and clean energy projects will only receive support if they become operational by December 31, 2027, or January 1, 2028.