Electricity grid is holding up despite outages, analysts say
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An ice-covered tree leans on power lines during the storm in east Nashville on Sunday. Photo: Kate Dearman/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This weekend's winter storm has caused widespread power outages in Nashville and other areas of the South — but as of Monday morning it hasn't severely strained the electricity grid.
Why it matters: Electric utilities across the country have seen heavy demand during the storm, with the possibility of power outages lasting multiple days.
- Officials were anxious to avoid a repeat of Winter Storm Uri, which left millions without power in Texas in 2021 and was responsible for at least 200 freezing deaths.
Driving the news: As of 7 a.m Sunday, more than 820,000 U.S. customers lacked power, according to the website poweroutage.us.
- But of that total, about 250,000 of the outages were in Tennessee, with most of those in the Nashville area. Nearly half of the city's residents were without power Sunday, Axios Nashville reported.
- In neighborhoods across the city, frozen rain caused trees to snap and take out power lines. The Nashville Electric Service warned power outages could "span over days or longer."
- In Texas, only about 60,000 of more than 15 million customers were without power. In Georgia, more than 80,000 people were without power Sunday after the storm moved through, Axios Atlanta reported, though that total was down by more than half on Monday morning.
"The power grid is under stress ... But nobody's at the extreme level of stress," Georg Rute, founder and CEO of the grid intelligence company Gridraven, told Axios. "It seems that while it's not an easy ride, the grid is handling it."
- Rute said the U.S. was "lucky that the worst of the storm was over the weekend, when there's less [electricity] load."
- He also noted that the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) made improvements to Texas' grid that helped ease the strain.
- That included adding wind and solar capacity. Wind and solar combined for an hourly average of more than 23,000 megawatts at one point on Sunday afternoon.
Zoom in: But Rute and others warned that the grid isn't fully out of the woods yet as cold and ice continue to topple lines and freeze equipment.
- "The current US winter storm so far is less severe than prior storms such as Uri and Elliott of 2021, 2022, but the risk isn't over, with sustained cold lingering behind the storm," said Matthew Palmer, executive director and head of Americas Gas Research for S&P Global Energy, in a Sunday statement.
The most critical window for PJM, the grid operator for 13 states and the District of Columbia, will be on Tuesday, ICF said.
- "Depending on temperatures, PJM could set a new all-time winter peak load on Tuesday," the grid operator said. "The extreme cold is currently expected to continue through Sunday, Feb. 1, so PJM is taking additional precautions with its generation and transmission owners to prepare."
What we're watching: Energy Secretary Chris Wright said his agency had issued emergency orders authorizing PJM, ERCOT and ISO-New England to keep enough power running even it means exceeding limits established by environmental rules or state law.
- The PJM and New England orders remain in effect until Jan. 31, while the ERCOT order runs through Tuesday.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with outage statistics and information on DOE's new emergency orders.
