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DOE's Alex Fitzsimmons on the Scott Jennings Show: How the Grid Held Through Winter Storm Fern
February 4, 2026 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:07:41
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
Alex Fitzsimmons, director of the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response at the Department of Energy, joined the Scott Jennings Show on February 4, 2026, according to the Department of Energy’s recording, to discuss how the grid performed through Winter Storm Fern. Fitzsimmons said the historic storm impacted more than 200 million Americans, that the energy sector deployed more than 64,000 personnel to rapidly restore power to almost one million people affected, and that most outages resulted from ice bringing down the distribution lines running to homes while the bulk power system — generation and transmission — held up, as he described the response under President Trump and Secretary Chris Wright.
Fitzsimmons credited three factors. First, he said Secretary Wright’s series of emergency orders over the past year, after President Trump declared a national energy emergency on day one, prevented the premature retirement of more than 17 gigawatts of reliable, dispatchable generation. Second, he said other orders leveraged more than 35 gigawatts of backup power at data centers and other large industrial sites to stabilize the grid. Third, he said 85 percent of the power delivered during Fern came from natural gas, coal and nuclear, in that order — the sources he said showed up when Americans needed them most.
Looking ahead, Fitzsimmons cited a department report from early last year projecting that, on the prior trajectory, the country was set to lose 100 gigawatts of reliable dispatchable generation by 2030 while needing roughly 100 gigawatts of additional new generation for load growth from AI, reshored manufacturing and competitiveness — a course he said would have produced 100 times more power outages by 2030, as the report projected. He said the administration has reversed that course toward energy addition across natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydropower and geothermal.
Why it matters
Fern was the first nationwide stress test of the administration’s keep-it-running generation policy, and Fitzsimmons’s figures — 17 gigawatts saved from retirement, 85 percent fossil-and-nuclear delivery during the storm — are the department’s evidence file for that policy.
Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Under Secretary Alex Fitzsimmons Joins The Scott Jennings Show - February 4, 2026”, 2026-02-04 (official upload, embedded above; published 2026-02-04). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.