The Department of Energy's Order No. 202-26-50 expires at the end of 16 October 2026. For four calendar days, from 13 October through today, PJM Interconnection has held Federal Power Act section 202(c) authority to dispatch the plants listed in its application even where an environmental permit or state rule would otherwise stop them, and to call on backup generation at data centers and other large loads as a last step before firm load is interrupted.
The order was signed on 12 October after PJM applied on 11 October. The application forecast demand at or around 111,500 MW on 13 October and said the grid operator expected to sit within 900 MW of its reserve margin on 14 October, with generation outages reaching 61,591 MW in the autumn maintenance window. The sharpest pressure was named in the BGE, PEPCO and Dominion zones. The same filing pointed to north-to-south limits on the Conastone-Peach Bottom 5012 500 kV facility, west-to-east limits on the Crete-St. Johns 345 kV tie with Midcontinent Independent System Operator, and loading on the Fostoria-Lallendorf path that constrains MISO-PJM seams transfers.
What the order actually did, and what the daily reports show it was used for, are different lengths of paper. The order text is a grant of authority. The compliance reports are the only public count of which units ran under that grant.
What the order authorised
Section 202(c) lets the Energy Secretary require generation, delivery or transmission when an emergency exists because of a sudden rise in demand or a shortage of energy or of facilities for generating or transmitting it. Order No. 202-26-50 finds that emergency in the PJM Region for the period it covers. Paragraph A directs PJM to dispatch Specified Resources from Exhibit A to its application, as updated, only as needed to keep the system reliable. Paragraph B authorises PJM to direct backup generation (auxiliary, standby, directly connected, battery storage or other, synchronised or not) to operate as a last resort before declaring an Energy Emergency Alert Level 3, or during an EEA 3. PJM may call on transmission owners and electric distribution companies to put that into effect.
Backup units that serve critical reliability or backup needs at defence, homeland security, first-responder, air-traffic-control, hospital, 911, water or wastewater, natural-gas pipeline or gathering facilities, and similar sites, are carved out. Backup generation run under the order is not treated as a capacity resource. Rate recovery sits under 16 U.S.C. § 824a(c). Operations under the order do not count toward applicable rolling-average emissions or hours limits, consistent with DOE's 4 February 2026 rehearing order on earlier 202(c) grants.
Paragraph E is the clause that produced the documents used below. PJM must send DOE a daily notice naming each Specified Resource and backup unit that operated in reliance on the order's allowances. Two of those notices were public by the morning of 16 October: the report for 13 October operations, filed about 14 October, and the report for 14 October operations, filed about 15 October. A report covering 15 October operations had not appeared on the usual PJM other-fed-state path as of mid-morning Eastern Time.
Adding the run-hours
The 13 October compliance report lists fifteen resource lines and their run-hours:
COM 936 Lincoln combustion turbines 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 each ran 4 hours. That is 28 plant-hours from the Lincoln bank alone. COM 940 Cordova 3 combined cycle ran 14 hours. Elgin CT 1 through 4 each ran 7 hours, or 28 plant-hours. Sauk Valley Community College ran 4 hours. The University of Akron appears twice at 5 hours each, 10 plant-hours in total.
Summing those lines gives 84 plant-hours on 13 October. Of that total, 14 plant-hours came from the two campus entries (Sauk Valley and the two Akron lines). Those are the clearest public signal in the first day's filing that the backup-generation limb of the order was used, not only the environmental-permit waiver for conventional plants.
The 14 October report is shorter. Cordova 3 CC ran the full 24 hours. The four Elgin CTs each ran 8 hours (32 plant-hours). BC Wagner CT ran 5 hours. The day's total is 61 plant-hours. There are no campus or other large-load backup names on the 14 October list.
Across the two reported operating days the public compliance filings therefore show 145 plant-hours of operation under Order No. 202-26-50. Cordova 3 CC alone accounts for 38 of those hours. The Elgin bank accounts for 60. The seven Lincoln CTs account for 28, all on the first day. Wagner adds 5 on the second day. Campus and large-load backup entries contribute 14, all on 13 October.
These are plant-hours as PJM reported them, not megawatt-hours. The filings do not publish the MW rating of each unit alongside the hour count, so the energy figure cannot be read off the same pages. What can be said from the primary documents is which named resources ran, for how many hours on each day, and that the campus/large-load backup entries appear on the first operating day and not on the second.
How the resource list moved
DOE's CESER docket page for Order No. 202-26-50 posts PJM's original application of 11 October, an Exhibit A dated 12 October, the order itself, and then updated Exhibit A files timed at 5:17 p.m. ET on 12 October, 3:15 p.m. ET on 13 October and 1:41 p.m. ET on 14 October. Paragraph G of the order lets PJM add units by written notice to DOE; those units are treated as Specified Resources unless DOE objects. The daily compliance reports are not the Exhibit A list. They are the subset that actually ran under the allowance. Lincoln, Cordova, Elgin and Wagner appear in the run reports as conventional Specified Resources; Sauk Valley and Akron appear as the campus/large-load backup entries on 13 October.
The order also sits against a January 22, 2026 letter from Energy Secretary Chris Wright to reliability coordinators and balancing authorities on leveraging backup generation during energy emergencies. PJM's application expressly asked for authority to direct large-load backup to run under a 202(c) order and for clarity that transmission owners and distribution companies could help bring those resources online. The October order is the short-window grant of that request for this autumn stress week.
What the numbers do and do not show
Eighty-four plant-hours on day one and sixty-one on day two is a narrow use of a broad waiver, if the Exhibit A universe is large relative to the units that appear in the daily reports. The public record does not, in the daily PDFs alone, state how many megawatts of Specified Resources sat on Exhibit A each day, so the share of the list that ran cannot be calculated from compliance notices alone. What the notices do show is concentration: Cordova and Elgin dominate the hour count; Lincoln is a first-day cluster; Wagner is a second-day add; and the only named campus/large-load backup run is confined to 13 October.
The forecasts that justified the order were for elevated demand, a high autumn outage rate and planned transmission outages, with the BGE, PEPCO and Dominion zones and the named transfer paths as the acute points. The compliance reports do not say whether an EEA was declared, whether backup at hyperscale data centers was called beyond the campus names, or how close PJM came to the 900 MW reserve-margin gap it had flagged for 14 October. They only name the units that operated under the allowance and the hours attributed to each.
PJM's Capacity Advisory for 12-14 October and MISO's overlapping capacity advisory and conservative operations were part of the pre-order posture described in the application. The order text also notes that PJM was evaluating transmission loading relief, recall of off-system sales and demand response. None of that operational colour is repeated in the daily run-hour tables. The tables are a minimal statutory report: resource name and run hours.
Expiry and the open day
Paragraph L makes the order effective 13 October through 16 October 2026, except for the daily reporting and related compliance duties. Renewal, if needed, had to be requested before expiry. As of the morning of 16 October, the CESER docket still framed the grant as the four-day window that began on 13 October. The 15 October operating-day report, which under the filing pattern of the prior two days would typically post on 16 October, was not yet on the PJM other-fed-state document path used for the 13 and 14 October reports.
Until that third daily report appears, the public run-hour total from primary compliance filings is 145 plant-hours over two days, of which 14 were campus/large-load backup entries on 13 October. Cordova 3 CC's 38 hours across both days is the single largest conventional contribution in those filings. The order that authorised those hours ends with the calendar day of publication.