What Winter Storm Fern Taught Congress — and What It Means for Your Facility

On January 24, 2026, Winter Storm Fern pushed much of the United States to its limits.

Temperatures plummeted across 10 states, from Texas to New England. At its peak, more than one million customers lost power, with restoration in the hardest-hit areas stretching beyond two weeks due to the weight of ice on overhead infrastructure.

The U.S. Department of Energy issued 39 emergency orders to keep specific generation assets online, including directing data center operators in the PJM region to transition their facilities to backup generation to help stabilize the broader grid.

Grid operators, out of options, called on private facilities to help keep the lights on for everyone else.

In March, the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Energy held a formal hearing to examine the lessons from Fern.

The testimony confirmed what many in the industry already understood: Fern exposed structural challenges that have been building for years, and they're getting harder to ignore as extreme weather events grow more prominent and electricity demand continues to grow.

Here's what the hearing revealed — and what it means for the organizations responsible for keeping critical operations running.

What Congress Heard From Winter Storm Fern

Lesson 1: Dispatchable power carried the load

During the storm's peak, hydrocarbons provided the majority of the power across the impacted regions. Wind and solar provided some, but not nearly enough to meet the need.

Congressman Russell Fry of South Carolina made the point directly in his testimony:

"Peak coal generation rose by 25%, and peak natural gas generation rose by 47%. Across all impacted regions, dispatchable energy significantly outperformed wind and solar generation."

The grid's ability to meet extreme demand depends on resources that can respond on command.

While renewable energy alone cannot carry peak load in many regions during an extreme weather event, battery energy storage changes the equation. When paired with on-site storage like the R3Di® System, renewable sources become far more dependable.

The battery captures and holds energy when the sun is shining or wind is blowing, and releases it on demand when conditions change.

That combination of generation plus storage is what makes a solar or wind investment genuinely resilient.

Lesson 2: The core problem is infrastructure

The committee found many of the power losses during Winter Storm Fern were related to infrastructure.

According to the Electric Power Supply Association, PJM's generator performance during the storm surpassed expectations and remained at or below normal outage rates. The Tennessee Valley Authority saw transmission lines damaged, which cut supply to roughly a dozen local power companies downstream.

For facility managers, this is the more actionable finding from Fern. The bulk power system held up, but the delivery system — the wires connecting generation to your building — did not, in the places where failure hit hardest.

e2Companies approaches this problem differently than utilities do.

Rather than waiting for aging transmission and distribution infrastructure to be rebuilt — a process that takes years and billions of dollars — Virtual Utility® puts utility-grade generation directly behind the meter, at your facility. That means power doesn't have to travel across vulnerable lines to reach your operations. It's generated, conditioned, and delivered on-site, removing the distribution layer during the moments when it’s most likely to fail.

Lesson 3: Demand growth is outpacing the grid's ability to serve it

Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa gave perhaps the sharpest summary of the structural tension at the heart of Fern's lessons:

"We're asking more of the grid in every region and increasingly relying on emergency tools and extraordinary coordination to navigate conditions that are becoming more common, not rarer,” she said.

Data centers, advanced manufacturing, and broader electrification of the economy are propelling electricity demand upward at a rate that new infrastructure can’t match — not because the technology is unavailable, she noted, but because permitting pathways for any new resource are slow, fragmented, and unpredictable.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Resource Adequacy Report quantifies the trajectory: retirements of existing generation combined with new load growth increase the risk of power outages by 100 times by 2030.

New England's situation during Fern illustrated this acutely.

The region holds a disproportionate 20% of the nation's total petroleum-fired capacity — a backup position it has held for years because limited gas pipeline infrastructure forces a reliance on oil-fired units when demand peaks in winter.

As Chairman Bob Latta noted in the hearing's opening:

"In spite of generous subsidies and favorable public policy choices, intermittent resources were nowhere to be found when New England needed power the most."

Lesson 4: The grid's "special sauce" is harder to replace than it looks

One of the more technically significant moments in the hearing came from Jim Robb, who addressed the hidden value of dispatchable baseload generation.

"Those facilities create the special sauce that keeps the grid operating," he said. "They create frequency, they create voltage, and they create the ability to control those within very tight parameters, which is what allows the high-voltage transmission system to operate."

This is the piece of the grid reliability conversation that often goes undiscussed.

Frequency and voltage stability, which allow sensitive equipment to function properly, depend on specific kinds of generation resources.

Removing them from the system without an equivalent replacement creates risks that don't always show up until a stress event arrives.

The Behind-the-Meter Shift Already Underway

The most striking policy development during Fern was PJM's coordination with data center operators to redirect their backup generation to support the broader grid. It worked. And it signals something important about where grid reliability is heading.

Facilities are no longer passive consumers of grid power.

In moments of extreme grid stress, they can become active contributors to reliability.

That role — participating in grid stability rather than just drawing from it — is what we’re enabling with microgrids and on-site infrastructure like Virtual Utility®.

How e2Companies Is Working To Solve These Challenges

The issues Congress examined during the Fern hearing are the same problems we built our technology to address. But Virtual Utility® goes far beyond emergency backups or alternatives to diesel generators.

It’s a permanent, intelligent infrastructure integrated into your facility’s energy strategy with two key components:

Conditioned, dispatchable power at the facility level

The R3Di® System operates as on-site, utility-grade power generation. Unlike standby diesel generators that sit idle and wait, the R3Di® runs continuously, in sync with the grid during normal conditions, and independently of it when needed.

It delivers conditioned power through dual-isolation transformers, eliminating the voltage sags and harmonics that damage sensitive equipment even when the grid is technically "on."

Fern taught us it’s not enough to have power available.

The quality of that power — its stability, its consistency, its ability to ride through grid disturbances without interrupting operations — determines whether facilities can function during the events the grid experiences on a regular basis.

Real-time intelligence through Grove365®

Managing an on-site energy asset well requires complex real-time monitoring and complex coordination. We’ve built a system for that, too.

Grove365® uses an AI powered monitoring software and a team of experts who watch weather patterns, real-time grid conditions, energy pricing, and asset health 24 hours a day.

When grid conditions tighten during a demand event, we run the R3Di System prime so you can or respond to utility demand response programs that compensate facilities for load reduction.

This is the capability PJM was looking for from data centers during Fern: the ability to shift reliably, on short notice, without disrupting operations. Facilities with the right on-site infrastructure and monitoring can participate in that way. Facilities relying solely on utility power cannot.

Watch this video from CERA Week to hear e2Companies CEO James Richmond share how our solutions are changing the conversation about power.  

Sub-cycle stability for the loads that can't tolerate interruption

We recently announced a partnership with Hitachi Energy to advance the next generation of its power conversion capabilities. At the center of that collaboration is e2Companies' Sub-Cycle Stability Bus™ (SCSB™) architecture — a system that stabilizes voltage, frequency, and harmonics at the sub-cycle level, faster than any grid disturbance can propagate into a connected load.

"Modular R3Di® systems are vital tools for any data center developer that speed up power delivery and drive stability through extreme transient events, including rapid AI-driven load swings,” e2 President and CEO James Richmond said. “Our customers, grid operators, and the public all benefit from innovative solutions that provide reliable power while decreasing demand on the broader grid."

A facility running a properly configured Virtual Utility® reduces pressure on the grid serving everyone around it, creating a path forward for a system under growing strain.

Deployable where the grid can't reach fast enough

One of the persistent frustrations in the Fern testimony was the speed gap between rising demand and the infrastructure needed to serve it. New transmission lines, new gas plants, and new pipelines take years to permit and build. Interconnection queues for new grid connections now stretch five to seven years in many regions.

The R3Di® System addresses this directly. Each unit provides up to 1 MW of power and is easily stackable and configurable, allowing for rapid deployment and phased expansion.

Facilities can come online with reliable on-site power without waiting for grid infrastructure that may be years away. The Hitachi Energy partnership extends this capability to hyperscale data center deployments globally, enabling grid-integrated stability with faster, more predictable power delivery for large-scale development projects.

Why Now Is the Time To Act

Dispatchable resources matter. Distribution-level resilience matters. And the growing expectation that large facilities can contribute to grid stability — not just consume from it — signals a meaningful shift in how energy reliability will be managed going forward.

Building reliable on-site power infrastructure now is the practical response to a grid that will face more events like Fern, not fewer. 

Join us at the upcoming Microgrid Knowledge conference in Orlando for a closer look at our next-generation microgrid, Virtual Utility®. 

You can also schedule a consultation to talk through what on-site power could mean for your facility's operations and energy costs.