As the eastern half of the United States baked under record heat late last month and electricity demand reached multi-year peaks, it looked like the grid might succumb.

Grid operators and public officials scrambled to avoid a disaster, ordering generators to defer maintenance and customers to conserve energy. The PJM Interconnection served about 161 GW of load on June 24, its highest demand since 2011 and not far off its all-time high of 165.6 GW.

But aside from scattered outages caused by heat-damaged electrical delivery equipment in parts of the New York City area, Eastern U.S. grids largely weathered the heatwave.

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