January 27, 2026 - The winter storm that stretched across half the county knocked out electricity to more than a million customers on Sunday, sending utilities scrambling to restore power ahead of the sub-freezing temperatures set to descend on tens of millions of people this week.

The outages, which were concentrated in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, came after warnings from weather forecasters that Winter Storm Fern could threaten the power grid and test utilities’ ability to meet the surge in demand.

The Trump administration took swift action to shore up some power supplies, with the Energy Department granting PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest electric grid operator, blanket permission to run all its power sources at full tilt — regardless of pollution rules in its region that reaches from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic.

The concern about energy supplies will grow in the coming days as Fern plunges millions into a cold spell that will put a significant draw on heating and electricity resources. The polar vortex conditions that plunged Arctic air all the way to the Gulf Coast are expected to drive temperatures even lower through the end of the week, running the risk of exhausting power supplies or debilitating the electricity grid.

The chief threat to the electric grid comes from ice and freezing rain that can topple trees and strain power lines. Given the storm’s expansive geographic range, utilities may have fewer personnel to dispatch to help neighboring regions deal with outages as they face disruptions in their own territories.

“The ice is the big concern this week and that’s scary,” said Allison Clements, a former commissioner on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “When these types of things happen, you can’t control the ice. You can’t control the tree branch break.”

As of 4:15 p.m. EST Sunday, Tennessee experienced the most outages in the country, at more than 308,000, according to PowerOutage.us. Mississippi had more than 149,000 customers without power, trailed by 138,000 in Louisiana, 103,000 in Georgia, 80,000 in Texas, 67,000 in Kentucky, 33,000 in West Virginia and 28,000 in South Carolina.

Georgia Power said it restored power to 70,000 customers as of 4 p.m. EST, though another 70,000 concentrated in north Georgia and Atlanta are still without electricity.

“The bulk of these outages are caused [by] trees laden with ice falling on power lines. We currently have more than 10,000 crews working diligently to repair these outages,” the utility said in a statement. “We are confident that we can meet demand [in] the next week.”

All told, 200 million people face some mix of sleet, snow, ice and frigid temperatures sweeping the nation which makes for a “deadly combination,” AccuWeather meteorologist Brandon Buckingham said in a Sunday note.

Power loss is the main threat to life over the coming days — and pressure on the power grid is mounting. The storm has added stress to the utilities and operators that were already struggling to meet rising demand fueled by the influx of data centers, artificial intelligence and other large customers. That all has shrunk the power generating slack in the system, bringing electric reliability concerns to the forefront.

PJM said Sunday that peak demand for its 13-state footprint is expected to surpass 130,000 megawatts for seven consecutive days for the first time ever, noting extreme cold conditions may persist through Feb. 1. It said the region could set an all-time winter peak load record on Tuesday and activated pre-emergency measures for utilities BGE, Pepco and Dominion to curtail electricity usage to preserve supplies.

“This is a formidable arctic cold front coming our way, and it will impact our neighboring systems as much as it affects PJM,” Mike Bryson Sr., vice president of operations at PJM, said in a statement. “We will be relying on our generation fleet to perform as well as they did during last year’s record winter peak.”

DOE also tapped data centers and other large customers within Texas’ grid to bring their backup onsite power onto the public grid, a move that allowed those generators to skirt pollution rules.

“As Winter Storm Fern brings extreme cold and dangerous conditions to the Mid-Atlantic, maintaining affordable, reliable, and secure power in the PJM region is non-negotiable,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.

Benchmark natural gas prices surged more than 80 percent in the three days before the storm, a jump that consulting firm Wood Mackenzie said was the largest increase in history. Supplies could get trapped if gas infrastructure in the Gulf Coast, which is unaccustomed to single-digit temperatures, succumbs to strain. Such a failure of natural gas infrastructure occurred during Winter Storm Uri in 2021 that killed 246 people in Texas.

Real-time electricity costs across the eastern half of the country soared on the storm demand, and operators overseeing New England and New York’s grid said consumption was outpacing forecasts by more than 3 percent as of 10:30 a.m. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which handles the grid from the Dakotas to Michigan south to Louisiana, said demand was below its forecasted peak, although it operated under alert for a few hours on Saturday due to “unplanned generator outages.”

Though the power disruptions so far appeared to be due to the storm, the frigid conditions to come this week could make the grid vulnerable to what the North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned in its latest winter reliability assessment: that several parts of the U.S. do not have sufficient energy supplies to meet demand during an extreme winter.

In its application to DOE requesting the emergency order, PJM said it has already experienced outages “trending up to 20,000 MW,” adding that “there are many other unknowns that could exacerbate already tightening system conditions.”

PJM has been the subject of scrutiny for rising prices as demand has squeezed power supply. The Trump administration has blamed the Biden administration and state policies that it contends incentivized solar and wind with artificially low prices that pushed gas, nuclear and coal power plants off the grid. Wright has said that has left customers in jeopardy of power outages during searing heatwaves or deep winter freezes.

On Sunday, those gas, coal and nuclear resources supplied an overwhelming majority of electricity to the nation’s largest customer base. Gas met more than 39 percent of PJM’s load, while nuclear supplied 26 percent and coal nearly 23 percent, while wind fed just shy of 5 percent.

“The claim that [Virginia] or any PJM state can run a modern grid without dispatchable gen is reckless. Facts are stubborn things,” former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chair Mark Christie posted on X.

Utilities spent the last week shoring up infrastructure by reinforcing wires and cutting tree branches to prevent major disruptions.

The Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing investor-owned utilities, said companies marshaled 63,000 workers from 43 states and the District of Columbia to sites in the storm’s path. EEI spokesperson Brian Reil said that was comparable to the personnel deployed to the theater of Hurricane Helene, the 2024 storm that inflicted $78.7 billion worth of damage across North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia.

Ice is Fern’s key threat. Even a quarter-inch of ice layers tree branches with exponentially more weight, raising the chances of limbs breaking and damaging wires. Half an inch can snap electrical wires. Beyond that, treacherous ice can prevent or delay response teams from accessing compromised infrastructuring and prolong recovery time.

“We’re expecting a very serious situation if the worst comes with this storm,” Duke Energy spokesperson Riley Cook said, noting the utility had dispatched 18,000 employees to 22 critical sites. “We could be seeing power lines come down or tree limbs fall on our power lines, and we have to get those up.”