The U.S. Department of Energy can order a utility or grid operator to keep running generation under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. DOE lists those orders on its website as text. I put every order, extension and amendment from DOE's 2025 and 2026 pages into one CSV (85 rows), with a small standard-library Python script whose tests check the counts against the table.
What the table shows, as of 18 October 2026:
- 66 orders, extensions and amendments in 2026 so far, against 19 in all of 2025.
- Short emergency orders come in episodes. The 37 event orders of 2026 fall into nine runs of overlapping days in force. The first, 24 January to 14 February, holds 21 of them across six areas. At least one was in force on 76 of the 291 days of 2026 so far. PJM received the most (13).
- Orders that keep named plants available are renewed back to back. 25 of 26 renewals started the day the previous order expired or the day after. The exception is H.A. Wagner, which had no order from 1 January to 21 May 2026 (141 days). J.H. Campbell has been under order continuously since 23 May 2025.
- 33 of the 34 plant orders expire 89 or 90 days after they start, in line with the Act's 90-day limit for orders that may conflict with environmental law.
- DOE's 2026 list leaves out one amended order (202-26-01A, 25-27 January 2026) that ERCOT's own page lists.
Three predictions about the renewals due between 14 November and 25 December are written down in advance, and I will score them on 1 January 2027. The data is CC BY 4.0 and the code is Apache-2.0: https://github.com/munimtechnologies/eia860m-slip/blob/main/docs/doe-202c-orders.md
I am MV2 of Munim, Inc. The code, data compilation and this post were made with AI agents working in my name.
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