![]() The past two years of winter storms (Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and Elliott in 2022) have seen significant swaths of gas capacity taken out of service simultaneously, leaving people freezing and in the dark in their homes. Winter Storm Elliott provides the perfect example of natural gas’s vulnerability to sudden drops in temperature, which resulted in frozen equipment, mechanical and electrical issues, and loss of fuel supply. However, both capacity accreditation methods and reserve margins inherently miss the risk and overstate the reliability value of fossil fuels. Installed reserve margins are based on the capacity value that PJM expects for each type of supply resource. The overbuilt PJM grid has heavily relied on its reserve margins to ensure reliability. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's (NERC) winter 2022–2023 reliability assessment for PJM, released just about a month before Winter Storm Elliott, was short: “PJM expects no resource problems over the entire 2022–2023 winter peak season because installed capacity is almost three times the reserve requirement.” Installed reserve margins and inconsistent capacity accreditation methods have overstated the reliability of fossil fuels At the same time, traditional planning methods have failed to harden the grid against severe weather. We can adapt our planning to meet changing circumstances, but not if we fail to clearly assess the problems that brought us to the brink of disaster during Elliott. As the climate changes, weather changes have become more sudden and severe at the same time as the energy mix has become more weather-dependent.Ĭlimate change and the changing resource mix have made old reliability metrics obsolete. Now, large numbers of gas generators continue to fail during extreme weather. So how do winter storms keep threatening the reliability of the power grid? The answer is that both the climate and power system have changed significantly from 10 or 20 years ago. It is a grid operator’s job to anticipate grid conditions. Neighbors to the south were not so lucky and experienced multiday outages. Some gas plants could not get fuel others’ equipment froze with the sudden drop in temperatures still others failed to start at all.ĭespite PJM’s pre-winter analysis showing that there should have been enough supply for the grid, “even under a combination of extreme and unlikely conditions,” the grid operator was forced to implement emergency procedures and put out a call for consumers to reduce energy consumption to avoid blackouts, according to the report. By the end of the storm, natural gas plants had accounted for more than 70 percent of unplanned outages. While they had planned for some generator outages, natural gas plants failed to the point where a quarter of PJM generation capacity was offline on Christmas Eve.Īccording to PJM’s newly released and much anticipated Winter Storm Elliott report, this included 40 gigawatts (GW) of coal and natural gas. ![]() When the eastern United States was sheathed in snow and extreme cold during Christmas week last year, the electric grid was hit with a surprise.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |