A summer of blackouts? Wheezing power grid leaves states at risk.
Why the grid could buckle in large areas of the country as temperatures rise
The nation’s power grid is under stress like never before, with regulators warning that the kind of rolling outages that are now familiar to California and Texas could be far more widespread as hot summer weather arrives.
A large swath of the Midwest that has enjoyed stable electricity for decades is now wrestling with forecasts that it lacks the power needed to get through a heat wave. The regional grid is short the amount of energy needed to power 3.7 million homes.
New Mexico’s attorney general is preparing for “worst case scenarios” after a regional utility warned of possible blackouts. North Dakota regulators advised the state to be ready for rolling outages, Arkansas officials are preparing emergency energy conservation measures, and power companies in Arizona are already sounding alarms about next year.
While America’s power grid has been showing signs of distress for years, the sudden warnings have surprised even those who were sounding an alarm. That’s because extreme weather precipitated by climate change and the early retirement of fossil fuel plants has accelerated the destabilization of the grid — a fragile collection of transfer stations and transmission lines already challenged by a lack of investment.
The situation has unnerved energy experts, who caution an unstable grid could set back plans to move rapidly toward a climate-friendlier economy. The plans rely heavily on most of the nation shifting to electric vehicles and plug-in home appliances such as stoves and water heaters, which will increase demands on the power system.
“We’ve been issuing warnings about the grid for a number of years,” said Mark Denzler, chief executive of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association. “But the swiftness with which this has happened has caught people by surprise. They didn’t think we would be having these issues for a couple of years.” In the event of outages, he said, heavy industrial users are the most likely to experience disruption, as utilities work to avoid cutting off electricity to residences in periods of extreme heat or cold.
The worries of rolling blackouts threaten to compound the stress and anxiety of the shaky economy, the enduring pandemic and energy shortages exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. And it has led to warnings in unexpected places.
Southern Illinois is among the most vulnerable places in the country heading into the summer, according to a newly published forecast by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a regulatory authority that monitors risks to the grid.
The area, along with large parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and other states linked to the regional grid, has been put on notice in the forecast that it is facing a “high risk of energy emergencies during peak summer conditions.” A major reason is that some of the coal plants that regulators assumed would keep running for another year or two are instead coming offline. Some plant operators are choosing to shut down rather than invest in upgrades for coal plants that do not fit with states’ and the federal government’s long-term goals for clean energy.
“We are seeing these retirements occur at a faster pace than expected,” said Jim Robb, chief executive of the regulatory authority. “The economics aren’t great, so coal plant operators are saying ‘uncle.’”
As demand across the Midwest is increasing, the amount of power available to the Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid that services a large swath of it has dropped, leading regulators to warn that outages could accompany extreme summer weather.
Retiring coal plants are just one of many challenges putting unprecedented stress on the nation’s electricity network.
“It’s a soup of things,” Robb said. “The grid is transforming. We are putting on a lot of new resources and learning how they behave.” That is compounded, Robb said, by prolonged stretches of extreme weather, the inability of utilities to get badly needed transmission lines built as they wrestle with land-use disputes, and difficulties delivering natural gas supplies to the power plants that are a crucial backstop to wind and solar energy when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
Some political leaders and utilities in the Midwest are assuring residents that their connections to neighboring grids can provide a backup of energy to avoid blackouts if the Midcontinent system gets overstressed. But energy experts warn those power transfers may not be available in the event of a prolonged heat wave that stretches across many states, as California learned when part of its grid became overwhelmed in the summer of 2020.
“They were counting on transfers,” Robb said. “But it was hot in Seattle, in Vancouver, in Portland. It was hot everywhere. Nobody had extra power to give.”
California has already put its residents on notice that a similar scenario could play out again this summer. State forecasts show that during peak summer periods, California will be short about the amount of electricity it takes to power 1.3 million homes.
How extreme heat is straining California’s electrical grid
Western and Southwestern states are also confronting fresh challenges with their power supply as they head into summer. Among the biggest is a drought already disrupting the hydroelectricity systems that are key to delivering reliable power to large areas of North America. In the event that extreme heat pushes up demand in the West again this summer, a hydroelectricity shortage threatens energy emergencies across the Western Interconnection grid, which serves 80 million people across 14 states and parts of Canada and Mexico. Parched rivers and reservoirs threaten to leave inadequate water flowing through the plants.
Drought is also a worry at nuclear and fossil fuel plants, where low water levels can impede the cooling process that is essential to consistent power generation.
“We are in uncharted territory with respect to water,” said Michael Wara, an energy scholar at Stanford University. “It has all kinds of implications.”
Texas, meanwhile, is still struggling to shore up an embattled power system that the state runs independently of the national grid. The state’s challenge was underscored in May — a relatively temperate month in Texas — when energy officials urged consumers to turn their thermostats up to 78 degrees and avoid the use of large household appliances during a brief period of unseasonably warm weather.
“For such a free-market, capitalist-oriented state, you have to see the irony in this,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston. “The last time I was told to turn my thermostat up to 78 degrees it was by Jimmy Carter.”
Drought in Texas threatens to inhibit the operation of steam-generated, or thermal, power plants, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corp., potentially triggering power shortages in the event of extreme heat.
“We’ve let our infrastructure decay to the point where we have these failures,” Hirs said. “Somebody has to stand up and start doing something. We have not even addressed what will happen to the grid when every two-car family switches to one plug-in Ford F150 [pickup truck] and one plug-in passenger car. The grid can’t even handle what we have now.”
Plug-in cars are the future. The grid isn’t ready.
The shift to wind and solar power is playing a role in the stability issues, but there is intense debate over whether the underlying problem is that the transition is happening too quickly or too slowly.
“Everybody has a good sense of where we want to go in terms of decarbonizing the fleet,” Midcontinent chief executive John Bear said during a press event hosted by the U.S. Energy Association. “We are moving in that direction. Unfortunately, we are moving in that direction quite quickly and I am worried about the transition.” He said the storage technologies needed to balance deployment of wind and solar energy are still in development, while at the same time the coal and gas plants that can provide more consistent power are either coming offline or not operating as reliably as they once did because their owners are reluctant to invest in upgrades.
But many other energy experts argue that getting reliable backup power in place to facilitate the transition is not a matter of waiting for new technology, but making the proper investments now.
“The problem is there is nobody in charge,” said M. Granger Morgan, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. The national power grid, he said, is a patchwork of regional systems designed to be guided by market demand in each area. Federal regulators have limited authority over it, and many states have constrained their own power to manage energy resources as part of a deregulation push that took hold in the 1990s.
“We don’t have the national regulatory arrangements and incentives in place to implement this energy transition in a coherent and rapid-enough manner,” Granger said. Energy experts point to transmission lines as an area in which the current system is failing. They are sorely needed to bring power generated at solar and wind farms in rural locations across state lines to energy-thirsty cities. But state regulators have been slow to approve them amid protests from property owners who don’t want the power lines on their land.
The problem is high on the list of priorities at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is working on rules intended to help clear the path for more lines to get built.
Manufacturers in Illinois have been worrying about all of these issues around the grid for some time. Now they face a more immediate challenge: making it through the summer.
“We’re supportive of a cleaner, greener future, but we need to have proper on- and off-ramps,” Denzler said.
Energy experts sound alarm about US electric grid: ‘Not designed to withstand the impacts of climate change’
(CNN)As heat ramps up ahead of what forecasters say will be a hotter than normal summer, electricity experts and officials are warning that states may not have enough power to meet demand in the coming months. And many of the nation’s grid operators are also not taking climate change into account in their planning, even as extreme weather becomes more frequent and more severe.
All of this suggests that more power outages are on the way, not only this summer but in the coming years as well.
Power operators in the Central US, in their summer readiness report, have already predicted “insufficient firm resources to cover summer peak forecasts.” That assessment accounted for historical weather and the latest NOAA outlook that projects for more extreme weather this summer.
But energy experts tell CNN that some power grid operators are not considering how the climate crisis is changing our weather — including more frequent extreme events — and that is a problem if the intent is to build a reliable power grid.
“The reality is the electricity system is old and a lot of the infrastructure was built before we started thinking about climate change,” said Romany Webb, a researcher at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s not designed to withstand the impacts of climate change.”
Webb says many power grid operators use historical weather to make investment decisions, rather than the more dire climate projections, simply because they want to avoid the possibility of financial loss for investing in what might happen versus what has already happened. She said it’s the wrong approach and it makes the grid vulnerable.
“We have seen a reluctance on the part of many utilities to factor climate change into their planning processes because they say the science around climate change is too uncertain,” Webb said. “The reality is we know climate change is happening, we know the impact it has in terms of more severe heatwaves, hurricanes, drought, and we know that all of those things affect the electricity system so ignoring those impacts just makes the problems worse.”
An early heatwave knocked six power plants offline in Texas earlier this month. Residents were asked to limit electricity use, keeping thermostats at 78 degrees or higher and avoid using large appliances at peak times. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, in its seasonal reliability report, said the state’s power grid is prepared for the summer and has “sufficient” power for “normal” summer conditions, based on average weather from 2006 to 2020.
But NOAA’s recently released summer outlook forecasts above average temperatures for every county in the nation.
“We are continuing to design and site facilities based on historical weather patterns that we know in the age of climate change are not a good proxy for future conditions,” Webb told CNN.
When asked if the agency is creating a blind spot for itself by not accounting for extreme weather predictions, an ERCOT spokesperson told CNN the report “uses a scenario approach to illustrate a range of resource adequacy outcomes based on extreme system conditions, including some extreme weather scenarios.”
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC — a regulating authority that oversees the health of the nation’s electrical infrastructure — has a less optimistic projection.
In a recent seasonal reliability report, NERC placed Texas at “elevated risk” for blackouts this summer. It also reported that while much of the nation will have adequate electricity this summer, several markets are at risk of energy emergencies.
California grid operators in its summer reliability report also based its readiness analysis on “the most recent 20 years of historical weather data.” The report also notes the assessment “does not fully reflect more extreme climate induced load and supply uncertainties.”
Compounding the US power grid’s supply and demand problem is drought: NERC tells CNN there’s been a 2% loss of reliable hydropower from the nation’s power-producing dams. Add to that the rapid retirement of many coal power plants — all while nearly everything from toothbrushes to cars are now electrified. Energy experts say adding more renewables into the mix will have the dual impact of cutting climate change inducing greenhouse gas emissions but also increasing the nation’s power supply.
Plan B
One Chicago neighborhood is already making plans for how to keep the lights, air conditioning and heat on when the larger grid fails.
In the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, solar panels dot the rooftop of a public housing complex. A short drive away, a a giant battery stores energy from the solar panels as well as natural gas generators, creating a micro grid. The state energy company, Commonwealth Eddison, is working with community members to make the neighborhood energy independent.
“Without power we are talking about potential life-threatening situations, so this micro grid provides that backup to be able to deliver power even when the [main] grid isn’t there,” said Paul Pabst, an engineer for Commonwealth Edison.
The project is pending approval but once it’s operating, the micro grid can connect and share power with the main grid. In the event of a blackout, it can disconnect and operate independently, tapping its stored battery energy to power the homes, police station and hospital in the area for four hours.
Yami Newell is a Bronzeville resident and energy advocate. She has seen the cascading effects of an unreliable power grid in Chicago, a place that’s no stranger to weather-related outages from both extreme cold and extreme heat. Losing power in a heatwave can create a dangerous health situation, and for families on a fixed income, losing all of the food in their refrigerator can be financially devastating.
“An energy crisis can become a public health crisis,” Newell told CNN. “It can become a food crisis.”
As communities look for innovative ways to build a more resilient grid, Bronzeville is one possible blueprint. Until states build a more resilient power grid, climate change will force energy companies to continue to take emergency actions, like asking people to limit electricity use or forced rolling blackouts to manage the grid when supply can’t meet demand.
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