From winter storms to sweltering summer heat, there’s a consensus among experts that increasing extreme weather, a shifting electric generation mix, delays in getting new power generation projects connected and the difficulties in getting new transmission lines and other infrastructure built all pose an increasing risk to the grid.
At U.S. Senate committee hearings as well as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission meetings, there have been plentiful warnings over the past few months about a coming reliability crisis.
Much of the debate has centered on what U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, characterized at a hearing last month as “reckless policies” aimed at limiting pollution from existing power plants, retiring older fossil fuel generation facilities and speeding the transition to cleaner sources of energy to mitigate the consequences of climate change.
But there’s been less sound and fury about one of the biggest factors in recent severe weather blackouts, like those across parts of the South during Winter Storm Elliott, when large numbers of fossil fuel plants, particularly those fired by natural gas, tripped offline because of freezing equipment, inability to secure fuel and other failures.
“The overwhelming threat to reliability right now is fossil plants failing to perform in the winter,” said Tom Rutigliano, a senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Sustainable FERC program.
And though FERC approved new power plant winterization standards in February, one commissioner flatly said they don’t go far enough and pointed out that they don’t become enforceable until 2027.
Winter might seem far off right now with much of the country in the grips of a punishing heat wave, but as it approaches, the grid is still very much vulnerable to severe storms like Elliott and Winter Storm Uri, which caused a catastrophic collapse of the Texas electric grid in 2021 that killed an estimated 246 people.
“Nothing really has fundamentally changed since last winter,” said Michael Goggin, vice president of Grid Strategies, a consulting firm focused on clean energy integration. “It’s just a question of do we get lucky and avoid another cold snap.”
‘Implement these recommendations now’
During Elliott, which brought rapidly plummeting temperatures to many parts of the country over the Christmas weekend, rolling blackouts were instituted by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides electricity for 153 local power companies serving 10 million people in Tennessee and parts of six surrounding states, Duke Energy in the Carolinas and several utilities in Kentucky, cutting power to hundreds of thousands of customers.
PJM, the nation’s biggest regional transmission organization, coordinating electric flow for 65 million people in parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, urged its customers to cut usage and avoided blackouts despite losing about 47,000 megawatts of capacity.
TVA said 38 of its 232 generating units were “negatively impacted, mostly due to instrumentation that froze,” during the storm, taking thousands of megawatts of power offline as demand surged to historic levels.
In Duke Energy’s territory in the Carolinas, the company lost about 1,300 megawatts of power output mostly from coal and gas (though no plants failed entirely) due to instrumentation issues from the cold and power imports from out of state that failed to materialize, a company spokesman said. Duke’s problems threatened the broader reliability of the broader electric grid that serves more than half the country, called the Eastern Interconnection.
In PJM, gas power plants accounted for 70% of the outages. “Most outages were caused by equipment failure likely resulting from the extreme cold, though broader issues of gas availability also contributed to the outages,” PJM staff wrote in a report released July 17.
”There has been a lot of talk that we must preserve the current resource mix, which in PJM is made predominantly of natural gas, coal and nuclear resources,” said Greg Poulous, executive director the Consumer Advocates for PJM States, at a FERC forum on PJM’s capacity market last month. “However I have yet to hear someone say that having 20% of coal resources and 23% of natural gas resources fail to perform during Winter Storm Elliott is acceptable. That seems to be lost in all of this.”
In a separate proceeding on an inquiry into what went wrong during Elliott, FERC Chairman Willie Phillips noted that extreme weather has become more commonplace.
“This is the fifth winter storm event that we’ve had in the past 11 years,” Phillips said. “So what seems to have been a…
Read More: Winter is coming and the U.S. grid remains vulnerable to power plant failures