A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
About 100,000 people are still without power after last week's massive winter storm. It rattled power grids and sent utilities scrambling. Now, that storm was followed by another this weekend in the southeast. North Carolina got more than a foot of snow. Even south Florida got some snow. Mose Buchele from member station KUT in Austin, Texas, takes a look at where the country's energy system held strong over the past week and where it showed weaknesses in the cold snow and ice.
MOSE BUCHELE, BYLINE: Let's start here in Texas, where winter storms inevitably bring back fears of another big blackout like the state had five years ago. Back then, power plants froze up right when demand was at its highest. There simply was not enough energy to meet the need. This time around, Tim Ennis says the freeze was not as deep and the power grid kept chugging along.
TIM ENNIS: Even better than, you know, I personally was anticipating.
BUCHELE: Ennis is an analyst with Grid Status. That's a website that tracks the energy system. He says better insulated power plants helped this time around, with an assist from Texas' expanding fleet of big backup battery storage.
ENNIS: They have almost instantaneous generation that you can't really get from any other source.
BUCHELE: Conditions got worse in the southeast. From Arkansas through Tennessee, over a million homes and businesses were without power at one point last week, not because power plants weren't producing enough electricity but because freezing rain snapped tree limbs and broke power lines, cutting off its distribution, says Salem Esber, who specializes in energy and utilities with PA Consulting.
SALEM ESBER: It's a miserable, in some cases, life-threatening situation, but those were driven primarily by the ice, taking down equipment.
BUCHELE: Moving up north, there were fewer outages but still plenty to worry about. That's because the freezing weather disrupted the natural gas supply, limiting gas availability and spiking prices right when power plants needed it. Jim Robb is the president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, the group that sets grid reliability standards. He says it's a problem that's been especially acute in the PJM Interconnection. That's the grid that covers much of the mid-Atlantic.
JIM ROBB: Some data I saw suggested that about 20 gigawatts of generation in PJM wasn't available to run because of winter conditions and/or fuel issues. So it's a real problem.
BUCHELE: A problem not just because 20 gigawatts is enough to power around 15 million homes, but because those high gas prices will translate into higher electricity bills.
ROBB: The price of natural gas hit all-time highs. So the economic consequence of a storm of this scale and duration is going to be very long-lived as those costs need to be recovered.
BUCHELE: Gas gets even scarcer in New York and New England, so a lot of power plants in the Northeast switch to burning fuel oil or diesel in winter storms. The problem there, says PA Consulting's Salem Esber, is that those fuel supplies are also limited.
ESBER: Most of them have three to five days of storage on site, and that's about it. And it may not be easy to refill the tank, so it could be several weeks before it's refilled.
BUCHELE: Bad news if the cold keeps coming. All these challenges from gas cutoffs to cold weather readiness will pose an even greater threat to grid stability as electricity demand increases, says NERC's Jim Robb.
ROBB: The margin for safety is declining. And the grid operators are having to use every tool in their toolbox, and they did this past week, to be able to keep the juice flowing.
BUCHELE: In its long-term outlook released just last week, NERC said major investment in new generation and transmission, better cold weather readiness and improved standards for the natural gas system will all be crucial to keeping the power running over the next 10 years.
For NPR News, I'm Mose Buchele in Austin. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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