Why it Matters

The House Energy Subcommittee convenes Tuesday to interrogate a question that has haunted Congress after every major freeze since 2021: Why does the U.S. power grid keep buckling under winter stress — and what will it take to fix it?

The hearing, titled "Winter Storm Fern Lessons: Supplying Reliable Power to Meet Peak Demand," is the first congressional deep-dive into the January 2026 storm that impacted over 100 million Americans and caused more than 1 million power outages at its peak. It arrives as the energy industry, federal regulators, and Capitol Hill grapple with a familiar but intensifying set of problems: natural gas supply constraints during extreme cold, accelerating coal plant retirements, and a grid increasingly stretched by rising demand.

Winter Storm Fern tore across much of the country in late January, stress-testing every major grid operator from Texas to New England. The storm forced the U.S. Department of Energy to issue emergency orders under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, temporarily allowing certain generation units to run at higher output to prevent blackouts. The EIA subsequently raised its natural gas price forecasts by 40 percent in the storm's aftermath.

The subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH), with Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX) as vice chair and Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) as ranking member, is framing this as an oversight and fact-finding exercise. No legislation is attached to the hearing. But the hearing memo and pre-hearing summary make clear the panel sees this as groundwork for potential legislative action on energy reliability and sustainability.

The hearing also fits a pattern. As the Niskanen Center noted in its post-storm analysis: "Uri, Elliott, and Fern occurred under different circumstances, but they revealed the same underlying pressure point: the power grid's dependence on natural gas during winter storms."

The Witnesses

The panel assembled four witnesses who represent different slices of the power grid reliability puzzle:

  • James G. Robb, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the entity responsible for setting and enforcing reliability standards across the continent.
  • Jose Costa, of the Northeast Gas Association, representing the gas supply side of the equation — a focal point given that New England saw oil provide 35 percent of peak power generation when gas deliverability tightened during Fern.
  • Brett Mattison, of Southwestern Electric Power Company, which operates in the ERCOT and SPP regions — areas that have been under a microscope since Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
  • Michael Goggin, of Grid Strategies LLC, a consultancy focused on transmission and grid planning.

The witness list signals the subcommittee wants to hear from both the supply side (gas and generation) and the planning and oversight side (NERC and grid analytics). Notably, ERCOT's own post-event report concluded that the Texas grid operator "successfully managed" through Fern — a marked contrast to the catastrophic Uri failures five years earlier. Utility Dive reported that ERCOT's performance during Fern demonstrated "what a modernized grid can look like under pressure."

That success story in Texas, however, sits alongside continued fragility elsewhere — particularly in New England and the PJM footprint, where fuel supply constraints and generation retirements remain unresolved.

The Lobbying Landscape

The energy committee hearing in 2026 comes amid sustained lobbying activity from the electric utility and gas sectors. Over the past year, at least 10 organizations filed lobbying disclosures on topics directly related to electric grid winter preparedness and peak demand.

Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for investor-owned electric utilities, filed four lobbying reports between the First Quarter of 2025 and the Fourth Quarter of 2025 covering grid reliability and electricity supply. Its PAC, POWERPAC, made an estimated 158 contributions totaling roughly $300,000 to $400,000 to members of Congress during the March 2024 to March 2026 period.

Southern Company filed three reports on energy infrastructure and grid topics over the same period, with its employees' PAC making approximately 133 contributions.

The Southwestern Power Resources Association — linked to the region where witness Brett Mattison operates — filed three lobbying reports on electric power supply. The Northeast Public Power Association filed three reports focused on electric reliability and grid infrastructure. And TransCanada PipeLines, a natural gas infrastructure company, filed during the Second Quarter of 2025 on gas supply topics.

Among subcommittee members, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) received a $500 contribution from the PAC associated with Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, which filed a fourth quarter 2025 lobbying report on energy supply reliability.

What to Watch

Several fault lines are likely to emerge Tuesday:

Fuel diversity vs. clean energy transition. Reporting from RealClearEnergy noted that DOE and NERC have both cautioned that continued coal retirements "without equivalent replacement by firm, dispatchable resources" increase outage risk. Expect Republican members to press this point. The Consumer Energy Alliance has urged policymakers to "embrace common-sense energy solutions," noting that home energy costs continue to rise despite gas price relief.

Transmission buildout. Grid Strategies' Goggin is likely to make the case for long-range, high-voltage transmission as a resilience tool — a position echoed by the Niskanen Center's analysis that transmission is "essential to building a more resilient grid."

Gas-electric coordination. Jose Costa's testimony from the Northeast Gas Association will likely address the gas deliverability constraints that forced New England generators to switch to oil during Fern's peak — a recurring vulnerability that has defied easy solutions for over a decade.

The ERCOT model. Texas' improved performance will be a data point both sides claim. The Electric Power Supply Association noted that organized power markets "withstood an extended winter stress test," with PJM reporting generator performance that "surpassed expectations."

The Bottom Line

Congress is building a record on what went right and wrong during Winter Storm Fern, and the answers will shape the next round of energy legislation — from generation mix requirements to transmission permitting to gas infrastructure investment.

For consumers who lived through over a million winter storm power outages in January, the policy debate is personal. The PowerOutage.us analysis published March 11 documented the outage impacts and restoration timelines in granular detail, providing a baseline the subcommittee will likely reference.

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