Winter Is Coming — and With It, a Higher Likelihood of Power Outages

It’s really hot right now, so naturally, I’m thinking about winter. 

Summer grid challenges are large — I’ve written about them here and here — but winter challenges are much larger. The US has now experienced five major winter outages in the last 11 years; the biggest of them all was in Texas in the winter of 2021. 

Gas supply and gas power plant failures triggered every one of those winter outages. As acting Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Willie Phillips said of gas supply and electricity grids, “People treat these two systems as if they’re different” but they're “more interconnected today than they’ve ever been.” 

In the winter, when gas goes down, the likelihod of power outages goes up. 

It’s important to note that the gas system has had significant problems in the Texas heat, too. Thankfully, our wealth of solar power has made that a moot concern … for now. But solar can’t bail out failing thermal plants on long winter nights, especially given “consistently increasing outage rates for coal.” 

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) also noted “the unavailability of the gas-fired generation fleet in recent years has been consistently higher during the winter months.” And Phillips recently remarked pointedly, “We don’t have a reliability organization for the gas system,” adding that while NERC has statutory authority for grid reliability, there’s a “reliability gap” for gas.

It’s time for Texans to get serious about year-round solutions to our grid challenges. That includes diversifying our approach to extreme heat and extreme cold…