July 2 was the hottest day of the year 2026 had seen, at least until the next day steamed up even hotter.
The temperature hit 102 in Charlottesville, 100 in Roanoke, 99 in Lynchburg, 98 in Danville and Dulles, 96 in Richmond.
Elsewhere on the East Coast, temperatures were even hotter. Newark, New Jersey, saw the mercury hit 104 degrees; Philadelphia and Atlantic City, New Jersey, were just a shade lower at 103 degrees.
So how did we stay cool? It was a clear, sunny day, which means that solar facilities were soaking up the maximum amount of rays. I spent much of the day following the live dashboard on fuel sources for the PJM grid, which is the electric grid that covers Virginia and all or parts of 12 other states, plus the District of Columbia.
12:50 a.m.: Wind output peaks; accounts for 3.8% of the grid
Let’s begin in the hour after midnight. At 12:50 a.m., output from wind energy reaches its peak: 5.11 gigawatts, which accounts for 3.8% of the total grid at that point. Wind energy typically peaks at night (which means it pairs well with solar). However, the states in the PJM grid don’t have a lot of wind energy.
Wind power is primarily in the Midwest; Iowa gets 73% of its power from wind, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Oklahoma almost 63%, Kansas just under 60%. Illinois (which is partly in the PJM grid) gets almost 20% of its power from wind; Indiana (another partial PJM state) gets almost 15%. Others, though, are in single digits to the point of being almost nonexistent (New Jersey and Virginia are less than 0.1% wind). The Trump administration has moved to halt as many offshore wind projects as possible, although Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project has survived and is now producing some power as construction continues. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.) Apex Energy of Charlottesville is currently building Virginia’s first on-shore wind project in Botetourt County. Virginia has the potential for more wind, but wind energy has historically taken a long time to develop, for both political and engineering reasons.
At 12:50 a.m., the top energy sources on the grid are gas, nuclear and coal. Spoiler alert: Those three sources will remain the top three through the day.
4:05 a.m.: Gas output hits its lowest point; nuclear its highest percentage
Power usage is lowest during the sleeping hours of early morning. At 4:05 a.m., gas is at its lowest output: 52 gigawatts.
More spoiler alerts: Nuclear and coal output don’t vary much through the day, which pro-nuclear and pro-coal advocates say is the benefit of those fuel sources: They are steady and reliable. On a percentage basis, nuclear output is highest at 4:05 a.m. when it accounts for 27.8% of the power on the PJM grid.
Note: It’s unclear why solar is showing up on this chart when the sun isn’t up yet. The best answer I’ve gotten is that might be an accounting issue for energy that really came from battery storage, but ultimately came from solar the previous day.
8 a.m.: Gas and solar start to rise, while wind drops
The sun rose on July 2 at 5:19 a.m. By 8 a.m., as temperatures start to rise and people are starting their day (and starting to crank up the air conditioning), we see gas output starting to increase (up 2.52 gigawatts from its low at 4:05 a.m.). We also see solar rising to the fourth-largest energy source with 3.96 gigawatts, but at just 3.2% of the grid, while wind has dropped.
10:40 a.m.: Solar output peaks; solar and gas have supplied most of the demand for new power
As the morning heats up, the additional power to the grid comes primarily from two sources: natural gas and solar.
From its low point at 4:05 a.m., the natural gas output on the grid is now up 10.1 gigawatts. Solar has added even more, peaking at 10:40 a.m. with an output of 13.34 gigawatts. Even so, it’s still just the fourth-largest energy source because nuclear and coal have remained steady. On a percentage basis, solar’s biggest contribution comes in the 10 o’clock hour, when it accounts for 9.4% of the grid’s power. Wind has dropped to almost nothing, at 0.3% of the grid’s power. In terms of a percentage contribution, that is wind’s lowest point of the day (again, a natural function of the wind being strongest at night). In terms of actual output, wind’s low point was 0.46 gigawatts at 11:15 a.m.
12:10 p.m.: Natural gas still rising, coal hits maximum output, solar drops
Now it’s shortly after noon. In terms of new power since our last check-in, it’s come almost entirely from natural gas. Natural gas output is now up 17.54 gigawatts since its low point at 4:05 a.m. Coal-burning through the day is generally steady, but this is its highest output, up 4.37 gigawatts since the early morning hours and up 1.51 gigawatts since our last check-in.
2 p.m.: Pump storage dams start to produce hydropower
By early afternoon, it’s already a scorcher. Gas, nuclear, coal and solar are all relatively steady at this point, but there’s a demand for more power, and it’s come from hydropower. There’s always some hydropower from conventional hydroelectric dams. What’s happening here is we’re starting to see pump storage dams (such as Dominion’s Bath County project or Appalachian Power’s Smith Mountain Lake) produce power for peak demand. Hydropower was at its lowest at 2:15 a.m., producing 0.39 gigawatts. Now it’s up to 2.26 gigawatts, and it will go higher, although it will never be a large percentage of the grid.
4 p.m.: As it gets hotter, we burn more oil
We haven’t talked about oil yet, because it’s generally such a small amount of the grid’s power. However, as temperatures heat up, oil starts flowing. Before daybreak, we were burning less than a gigawatt’s worth of oil; now we’re up to 5.11 gigawatts, and it’s surpassed hydropower (which has doubled in the past two hours) at 3.2% of the grid. Still, though, our main power sources remain the same: gas, nuclear, coal, with solar in fourth during the day. The gas output is more than 18 gigawatts higher than it was 12 hours earlier.
Five minutes after this screenshot, we see power start to enter the grid from another source we haven’t had occasion to talk much about yet: battery storage. It starts at 0.1% of the grid at 4:05 p.m. and, well, let’s see what happens.
7:15 p.m.: Gas, hydro, oil and storage all peak, solar drops by half
This is the part of the day when energy demand is the highest. It’s still unreasonably hot, so air conditioning is running full blast. People are also home and starting to cook, watch television and use other devices that require electricity.
In the 7 o’clock hour, natural gas, hydropower, oil and battery storage all hit their highest output while solar output has now dropped by half, arguably when we need power the most. Its output was 12.4 gigawatts at 4 p.m.; now it’s down to 5.09 gigawatts. Hydropower has now become our fourth-biggest power source, at 7 gigawatts. Battery storage also hits its high point: 0.18 gigawatts, but still just 0.1% of the grid’s power.
10 p.m.: As the day cools down, gas accounts for almost half the grid’s power
Come night, natural gas is still producing at almost its highest output of the day. And on a percentage basis, natural gas peaks at 47.2% of the grid at 9:45 p.m. and stays close to that for the rest of the night. The hydropower dams are still producing the fourth-highest amount of power, while solar and storage have dropped down to 0%. Wind is starting to pick up a little.
Summary: The highs and the lows
In terms of their output, nuclear goes virtually unchanged throughout the day. Coal only changes a little. The biggest variation in output is from natural gas, which goes from a low of 52.11 gigawatts at 4:05 a.m. to a high of 72.2 gigawatts at 7:15 p.m. That’s a change of 20.09 gigawatts, which illustrates why gas advocates like gas: You can just turn it on whenever you need it. Solar saw the second biggest change, going from essentially zero to 13.34 gigawatts.
Everything with energy is a tradeoff; there is no perfect energy source: Gas is reliable but is a fossil fuel. Solar is a free fuel source and emits no carbon, but isn’t always available.
This exercise also shows the enormity of the challenge we face in replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Natural gas dominates the PJM grid, with its share of the output ranging from 43.5% to 47.2%. Coal, even in its reduced state, accounts for 17.4% to 21.5% of the power output. Even before we account for that small amount of oil, that’s a lot of fossil fuel to be replaced. There’s also the inconvenient fact that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.
The real challenges to phasing out fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables seem more political than technological. Think of all the solar facilities we now see across Virginia, and the political pushback those have sparked. Now look at the charts above: We’d have to more than double solar output to replace coal even at peak solar time. We’d have to septuple it to replace both gas and coal. Is that politically possible?
Botetourt County recently saw proposals for two relatively small utility-scale solar projects. Suddenly the county bloomed with “no industrial solar” and “Keep Botetourt green” signs. Both projects were rejected. In neither case is the land likely to stay green; both tracts are in high-growth parts of the county. If those landowners can’t make money from solar, at some point they may be forced to make money from turning the land into housing developments. The Solar Database compiled by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia shows that the number of solar projects approved in Virginia is declining; so is the number of megawatts being approved. Solar is the cheapest, and quickest, form of energy to add to the grid, but it seems to be becoming harder to do so, even as people complain more loudly about rising power costs.
Battery storage is touted as a way to store up renewable energy that’s “over-produced” during peak hours for solar and wind, and then feed it into the grid when the sun is down and the wind is light. Batteries can also be used to mitigate energy costs: Store up power during low-cost hours and then use it during peak demand when prices are highest. The immediate challenge for battery storage is that batteries don’t last that long. Technology may solve that problem but there’s still the question of how much people will trust reliance on batteries, knowing that they could run out during some extreme weather event. Still, though, we come back to the political problems: Culpeper County recently banned battery storage from farmland, restricting the units to industrial land. This 6-1 vote by the board of supervisors came over the objections from some farmers who saw battery storage as a way to squeeze extra money out of farmland. (This is often the argument for solar, as well.) A farmer can park a rusting tractor that doesn’t work out back of the barn, but parking a battery storage unit is now forbidden. Opposition to a form of energy overrides property rights even in a conservative county where property rights would normally be a rallying cry against a meddlesome government.
Wind is even harder to build than solar or battery storage — again, largely for political reasons. Apex first produced its Botetourt project in 2015 and that seemed a relatively easy one: Much of the project is out of sight and has had the support of a Republican board of supervisors, which saw the benefit of tax revenue and not much downside. That Rocky Forge project has also taken 11 years to build. Building other wind facilities anywhere else seems a hard lift.
That brings us to nuclear: It’s enjoyed a renaissance, at least rhetorically, as a way to produce lots of reliable, non-carbon energy. However, nuclear power has always been expensive and taken a long time to build. Smaller nuclear projects — small modular reactors — offer the promise of being quicker and cheaper, but we don’t know that yet because we don’t have any yet in North America (and we’re not likely to take the experience of the Russians and Chinese as our model). Let’s suppose they are commercially feasible, though. Based on these charts above, we’d need three to four times as much nuclear energy as we do now to replace gas and coal. Once again: Is this politically feasible? Realistically, we’re looking at some combination of fuel sources, but there is opposition to every single one of them, be it natural gas plants or solar facilities or battery storage or, well, you name it.
Feel free to argue the merits and demerits of your favorite (or least favorite) fuel source. Regardless of what it is, these are the numbers we have to deal with.
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