WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congressman Bob Latta (OH-05), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy, led a hearing titled, Winter Storm Fern Lessons: Supplying Reliable Power to Meet Peak Demand. “In spite of generous subsidies and favorable public policy choices, intermittent resources were nowhere to be found when New England needed power the most. Because limited gas pipeline capacity in the New England region restricts supply and raises prices, power plants had to opt for more expensive and less efficient fuel oil,” said Chairman Latta. “The lessons of Winter Storm Fern should illustrate that common sense must rule the day. American energy dominance and independence must be achieved so we can keep our communities safe at home.” Watch the full hearing here . Below are key excerpts from today’s hearing: Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01): “The lesson from Winter Storm Fern is that 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. At the same time, we’ve layered on emergency orders, special directives, and broad must-run orders that, in some regions, effectively over-procure generation and crash prices. Those tools helped us through Fern, but they’re not a sustainable business model for a grid that’s about to serve even larger loads. Data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrification across many levels of our economy are driving demand up quickly. Yet building the infrastructure to serve that demand, modern gas plants, nuclear, storage, new pipelines, transmission lines, or any renewable source, which Iowa does have, takes years longer than it should. Not because the technology is unproven, but because our permitting pathways are slow, fragmented, and unpredictable.” Congressman Russell Fry (SC-07): “Reliable energy is essential to every aspect of our modern life, especially to public health and welfare. Yet power outages cost the American people $44 billion each year. Winter Storm Fern highlighted the importance of grid reliability, leaving more than one million customers without power at its peak, including 70,000 in my home state of South Carolina. These disruptions make it clear that reliability must remain a top priority, particularly during severe weather events that place extraordinary strain on the electric system. Fern also demonstrated the critical importance of dispatchable energy sources. 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 performance during severe weather depends not only on these baseload and dispatchable resources, but also on real-time coordination among grid operators, generators, transmission owners, marketers, and other market participants. Analyzing how the bulk power system performs during these events is essential to strengthening reliability and ensuring the continued delivery of electric power that Americans depend on every day.” Congresswoman Julie Fedorchak (ND-AL): “I agree with you — it should be bipartisan. Mr. Robb, how are premature retirements of baseload resources such as natural gas and coal making matters worse when we have increased demand?” Mr. Robb: “Thanks for the question. It makes matters worse in a number of different ways. When you lose the energy production associated with those facilities—and we saw in Winter Storm Yuri that a number of facilities operating under 202(c) orders did perform and were required to keep the lights on—there’s no question about that. The second thing is that those facilities create the special sauce that keeps the grid operating. 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. Without that kind of generation, we don’t have the ability to operate a transmission system of the scale that we have.” ###