NERC 2026 State of Reliability: Forced Outages Hit 9.2% as Data-Center Load Swings Top 1,000 MW

NERC’s 2026 State of Reliability report, released June 24, 2026 in Washington, D.C., finds the North American bulk power system performed reliably through 2025 while its margin for error narrowed. Conventional generator forced-outage rates increased to 9.2 percent, above the historical 7-8 percent range, and data centers produced two customer-initiated load reductions exceeding 1,000 MW during the year. Coal units recorded a 39.8 TWh increase in unavailable energy and combined-cycle gas units a 19.1 TWh increase, shrinking deployable reserves exactly as demand growth accelerates.

What the Report Found

Weatherization investment showed up in the data: conventional generation performed better through the most challenging winter week of 2025 than in earlier cold events. Across the full year, though, availability fell, with the decline concentrated in coal and combined-cycle units. Battery storage grew at roughly the same rate as solar and supplied fast frequency response and smoothing for wind and solar variability at material scale, while the broader build-out of inverter-based resources continued to add operational complexity. On the load side, NERC counted the two data-center reductions above 1,000 MW alongside many more above 100 MW, and it proposes a new functional entity type, the Computational Load Entity, that would bring large computational loads with material grid impact under mandatory Reliability Standards. Jack Norris, NERC’s manager of Performance Analysis, pointed to “the growing need for accurate load modeling and operational coordination.”

Why It Matters

A 1,000 MW load departure is the same size disturbance as losing a large generating unit, but it arrives from the demand side, where nothing equivalent to interconnection studies, ride-through obligations, or performance standards yet applies. Frequency does not care which direction the imbalance came from. At the same time, the thermal fleet that operators lean on for reserves is delivering less: a 9.2 percent forced-outage rate against a 7-8 percent norm translates directly into fewer deployable megawatts behind every contingency. The report’s own framing is that reliability now depends on anticipating and modeling these risks rather than only building capacity, because the two trends compound: volatile gigawatt-class demand is arriving exactly as the dispatchable margin behind it thins.

Critical Perspective

The State of Reliability is a rearview mirror: it measures 2025, and the loads driving its sharpest warnings are being energized in 2026 and beyond. The Computational Load Entity concept now enters NERC’s standards pipeline, a process measured in years, while individual campuses larger than 1,000 MW are already signing interconnection agreements. The report is also silent on causes it has not yet separated: whether the coal and combined-cycle availability slide reflects aging units, harder duty cycles, or deferred maintenance, a distinction that determines whether the trend is reversible. And its recommendations, measurable generation-performance indicators, published incident analysis, and monitoring of battery performance worldwide, are monitoring commitments rather than requirements. The margin for error narrows either way; the open question is whether standards catch up before the next 1,000 MW surprise.