Imagine your Ford pickup powering your home appliances

Workers assemble a Ford F-150 Lightning at the company's Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan.

Workers assemble a Ford F-150 Lightning at the automaker’s Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan. Ford discontinued the all-electric, full-size F-150 in December 2025. Courtesy of Ford Motor Co.

By Brian Martucci, Utility Drive

The Ford Vehicle Connector links Ford F-150 Lightning and PowerBoost Hybrid trucks’ 240-volt outlets with GPP’s GenerLink transfer switch. It can deliver power to home outlets and hardwired appliances like well and sump pumps, security systems, gas furnaces and lighting that can’t be powered with generator extension cords, Ford and GPP say.

Nic Saeger, CEO of Global Power Products, told Utility Dive that the product greatly simplifies and reduces the cost of home backup for rural utility customers, who typically face longer outages and have more critical hardwired appliances, like well and sump pumps. Rural customers in most of the U.S. experience longer and more frequent power outages, according to an analysis of Poweroutage.us data.

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PJM’s management comes under attack at FERC conference. Where’s Gov. Sherrill?

By , Reuters,  July 23, 2026

NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters) – U.S. energy officials questioned PJM Interconnection’s power structure on Thursday as regulators weigh reforms to the country’s largest power grid, which faces the growing risk ​of blackouts as data center demand soars and little new electricity supply is added.

PJM, which covers 67 million Americans across the Mid-Atlantic and ‌Midwest that include the world’s biggest concentration of data centers, has struggled with power shortfalls and surging electricity prices since demand in the region began to accelerate roughly two years ago.

Officials with the White House, state governments and power industry executives convened at a technical conference held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to discuss potential solutions to PJM’s supplies and pricing woes.

Some of those proposals ​included giving the grid operator’s board of managers more independence from its stakeholders, which include voting members like utilities and independent power producers, and more control to ​enact changes in the market that covers 13 states and the District of Columbia.

OPINION: If NJ governor’s #1 priority is energy affordability, why was she a no-show at FERC hearing?

PJM’s hundreds of members, including transmission owners and power ⁠plant operators, vote on market rules through a multi-layered process, with the board ultimately deciding whether to approve proposed changes.

Under proposals floated at the conference, those members would ​potentially serve in a type of advisory role instead of voting directly on PJM rules – a change that would shift more decision-making onto the board of managers.

“I don’t know ​how to get around it without breaking the system up to where the board is empowered to get a backbone,” said FERC Commissioner David LaCerte.

LaCerte said the board should take bolder action instead of caving to the demands of its stakeholders, whose conflicting interests can ultimately slow PJM’s primary work of ensuring the grid operates reliably and affordably.

Read the full story here

 

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PJM’s electric grid structure comes under attack at FERC conference. Where’s Sherrill?



By , Reuters,  July 23, 2026
NEW YORK, July 23 (Reuters) – U.S. energy officials questioned PJM Interconnection’s power structure on Thursday as regulators weigh reforms to the country’s largest power grid, which faces the growing risk ​of blackouts as data center demand soars and little new electricity supply is added.
PJM, which covers 67 million Americans across the Mid-Atlantic and ‌Midwest that include the world’s biggest concentration of data centers, has struggled with power shortfalls and surging electricity prices since demand in the region began to accelerate roughly two years ago.
Officials with the White House, state governments and power industry executives convened at a technical conference held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to discuss potential solutions to PJM’s supplies and pricing woes.
Some of those proposals ​included giving the grid operator’s board of managers more independence from its stakeholders, which include voting members like utilities and independent power producers, and more control to ​enact changes in the market that covers 13 states and the District of Columbia.
OPINION: If NJ governor’s #1 priority is energy affordability, why was she a no-show at FERC hearing?
PJM’s hundreds of members, including transmission owners and power ⁠plant operators, vote on market rules through a multi-layered process, with the board ultimately deciding whether to approve proposed changes.
Under proposals floated at the conference, those members would ​potentially serve in a type of advisory role instead of voting directly on PJM rules – a change that would shift more decision-making onto the board of managers.
“I don’t know ​how to get around it without breaking the system up to where the board is empowered to get a backbone,” said FERC Commissioner David LaCerte.
LaCerte said the board should take bolder action instead of caving to the demands of its stakeholders, whose conflicting interests can ultimately slow PJM’s primary work of ensuring the grid operates reliably and affordably.
Read the full story here

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How AI Data Centers Glitch Simultaneously Caused a 1,000-Mile Disturbance

Image: Tara Energy
By Rex Edison, Yahoo News

On a Wednesday morning in northern Virginia, lights flickered. Air conditioners groaned. Refrigerators made sounds they shouldn’t. No storm rolled through. No transformer blew. Instead, a transmission line went down, and the AI data centers powering your cloud storage, your AI chatbots, and your streaming queues did exactly what their protection systems told them to do: they all disconnected from the grid at once.

More than 3 gigawatts of demand — enough to power several mid-size cities — vanished almost simultaneously. The grid wasn’t ready for that.

According to Reuters, utility Dominion Energy confirmed that data centers’ internal control systems detected the fault on July 22 and automatically switched to backup power. PJM Interconnection — the largest U.S. grid, serving 67 million people from Washington, D.C. to the Midwest — registered a sudden frequency shift, the electrical equivalent of a cardiac arrhythmia. Bob Marshall, CEO of sensor-network company Ting Labs, told Reuters that his company’s 1.4 million sensors picked up voltage disturbances stretching from D.C. all the way to Chicago. “The power quality took a pretty big hit,” Marshall said. Grid disturbances normally resolve in milliseconds. This one took roughly 10 minutes.

  • More than 3 GW of demand disconnected almost simultaneously on July 22 — roughly 3% of PJM’s total load at that moment

  • Voltage disturbances registered across 1.4 million sensors from Washington, D.C. to Chicago (Ting Labs, via Reuters)

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Coalition urges NJ to mandate battery storage at peaker plant

Kearny Peaker Plant | Jim Henderson


By Brian Publicover, PC MAGAZINE

A coalition of environmental justice groups has urged New Jersey state regulators to tie the permit of a gas peaker plant that powers New York City to batteries, rather than just gas.

The PEAK Coalition – UPROSE, THE POINT CDC, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and Clean Energy Group – has filed comments demanding that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) attach that condition to the Title V Operating Permit renewal for Bayonne Energy Center, according to Clean Energy Group’s publication of the filing.

The coalition is pushing the NJDEP to force the plant to upgrade its turbines from simple-cycle to combined-cycle, which the coalition said are more efficient. The advocacy group has also asked NJDEP to add at least 65 MW/780 MWh of battery storage to hybridize with the plant.

According to a recent comment letter from the coalition, a battery system of that size would replace 81% of one representative turbine unit’s operating events because most such events last 12 hours or less. It said the change would reduce plant-wide sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide emissions by about 4% and nitrogen oxide emissions by about 5%.

The coalition has also argued that New Jersey’s Environmental Justice Law gives the NJDEP the authority and obligation to impose such conditions. It noted the cumulative pollution burden already faced by Bayonne’s surrounding community, according to a separate summary from the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest.

Read the full story here

 

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Opinion: NJDEP budget cuts are part of the war on the environment

Permit giveaways, budget raids, and weakened enforcement are reshaping NJ environmental agency.

 

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By Jeff  Tittel in The Jersey Vindicator

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection budget has been signed, and it reveals exactly where the state’s priorities lie. A budget is a roadmap. It shows what the government values and what it is willing to invest in. The DEP budget used to represent a commitment to protecting our air, water, parks, wildlife, and public health. Today, it is being transformed into something very different: the Department of Expedited Permits.

The Sherrill administration talks about “efficiency,” “cutting red tape,” and “modernizing government.” Don’t be fooled. When politicians say they’re cutting red tape, what they usually mean is they’re cutting environmental protections. They’re replacing science with stopwatches, public participation with corporate consultations, and environmental review with rubber stamps.

This isn’t simply about making permits move faster. It is about changing the mission of the DEP itself. Instead of asking whether projects should be approved or how their impacts can be minimized, the focus is now on how quickly permits can be issued. They have even renamed permit applicants as “customers.”

The result is a dangerous combination of budget cuts, weakened enforcement, fast-track permitting, climate rollbacks, and billions of dollars in subsidies for dirty and risky energy projects. It is an agenda that puts corporate developers, fossil fuel companies, and politically connected industries ahead of the people of New Jersey.

This isn’t environmental policy. It’s the continuation of the war on environmental protection.

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