Holiday cold

Power grid operator PJM uses this control room near Philadelphia to monitor and control electricity for 65 million people in 13 states and the District of Columbia.

A willingness to conserve electricity may have saved millions of residents in the Chesapeake Bay region from seeing their holiday lights go dark last year.

Details are emerging of how an unprecedented cold snap from Winter Storm Elliott on Dec. 23–25 caused unanticipated contractual failures from power generators — especially natural gas plants and pipelines.

Clouds on the energy horizon formed on Dec. 23 with a record-breaking temperature plummet of 29 degrees in 12 hours. As power use spiked, grid operator PJM enacted emergency procedures, which included calling on generators to produce maximum amounts of electricity, as they had been contracted to do in such situations.

But the cold caused what PJM called "an extremely high rate" of forced outages from power generators. As a result, PJM took other late-night emergency actions such as asking the public to conserve electricity and keeping power from being sold outside the PJM grid to avoid rolling blackouts, which typically last 15– 60 minutes at a time.

Residents in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia and Washington, DC, are part of the 13-statePJM grid. The last systemwide rotating power blackouts occurred during a cold snap in 1994.

High-voltage power lines.

The fallout from the power shortage is still ongoing on several fronts, most broadly raising the question: Will there be enough power for PJM's 65 million customers during the increasing number of extreme weather events?

Nearly one-quarter of the anticipated electricity was not generated as power producers encountered problems during Winter Storm Elliott.

PJM has levied $1.8 billion in nonperformance charges against some 200 power generators that were contracted to produce more power during the weather emergency but couldn't because of a range of equipment and supply failures.

One Illinois utility has declared bankruptcy partly because of the fines and at least eight utilities have protested the penalties and appealed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to intervene.

The near-miss from surprise power shortages was not supposed to happen. Weather emergency protocols had been adopted in 2022.And PJM had secured guarantees from generators that would be paid to provide power during storms after a rocky power supply event during the polar vortex of 2014.

PJM is now in an accelerated process to study lessons learned from the December event and to come up with a new blueprint for dealing with extreme weather by Oct. 1.

Approximately 63% of power shortfalls from electricity generators during the weather emergency were from plants driven by natural gas. Another 28% were from coal plants.

The cold hindered the production of natural gas from wells—especially fracked gas in the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale regions, according to PJM. Supplies dropped 27% from usual levels. In Pennsylvania, well freeze-offs dropped production 20%. In addition, pipeline compression issues slowed delivery of gas to power plants.

"The greatest cause of outages appears to be failure of plant equipment, along with failure to start, units tripping offline and temperature-related failures," PJM reported.

"PJM will rely on existing and new gas-fired generation in the foreseeable future, and it is essential that such resources have the gas supply arrangements that will permit them to provide reliability and flexibility and competitive offers," PJM noted after the weather emergency in its 2022 State of the Market report.

PJM urged FERC to require stricter weatherization standards for the natural gas industry.

In contrast to the poor performance of some gas– and coal-power producers, PJM said solar, wind, nuclear and hydro sources performed well. They will receive the fines collected as bonuses for providing energy beyond capacity obligations during emergency conditions.

One Pennsylvania state legislator pointed to the importance of nuclear energy during the emergency.

"I don't think Pennsylvanians realize just how close we all were to going dark last Christmas,"wrote Rep. Tom Mehaffie(R-Dauphin Co.) in an opinion column on the PennLive.com news site. "You know what really saved Christmas? It was the 31 nuclear reactors in PJM. PJM found nuclear plants overperformed and were the difference in avoiding the lights—and heat—going out for millions."

Other factors played a role too.

As energy demand on Dec. 23 hit the third-highest level recorded for winter in the 13-state region, PJM took the unusual step of reaching out to news media, social media, state governments and utilities to issue appeals that customers cut back on electricity use.

The public heard the call for conservation, and PJM officials credit the voluntary response with helping to head off power disruptions.

Some power plants, with permission from the U.S Department of Energy, were allowed to exceed air pollution limits to produce more power. And utilities that had planned to produce power to be sold out of the region were ordered to keep it in the PJM grid.

Grid operators outside of PJM also supplied some power to help the shortage.

"I want to stress that PJM and its members kept the power flowing during unprecedented weather that was challenging for many areas of the country, some of which experienced weather-related outages," said PJM spokesman Jeff Shields.

But PJM also said, in a statement, "PJM did get through this historic event without any loss of load, but it was tighter than expected, and we don't want a repeat of it. We can and should do better."

Ad Crable is a Bay Journal staff writer based in Pennsylvania. Contact him at 717-341-7270 or [email protected].

Wow! We dodged a disaster! We saw what happened in Texas and whil PJM residents are generally prepared for winter, people take their power for granted.

Thank you for researching the role of nuclear, solar, and wind. I worked for a local power utility for 38 years. The whole time I was there we continually replaced equipment: transformers (I really wish people knew what it takes to manufacture, test, disassemble, ship, inspect, pour concrete fountain, assemble, vacuum-oil-fill, test, and place in service, one 230,000 volt transformer), 110 KV switches, 13 kv indoor circuit breakers, 33KV - 33kv- 110 kv- 230kv oil circuit breakers replaced with Sulfur Hexaflouride insulated circuit breakers, relay and control equipment, all four 500KV transformers at Cakvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant and all associated 500 kv switches. This is by no means a complete list, just something to show just how daunting a task it is to upgrade our antiquated power grid.

Great article.

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