By David Wojick
Cold kills and America is at great risk of deadly subzero blackouts. Renewables are part of the problem but gas is the biggest part. We now know that the supply system that feeds our gas fired power plants can be unreliable in extreme cold weather.
Switching from coal to gas has made us vulnerable to cold weather blackouts. We need a program to address and cure this vulnerability. Action at both the State and Federal levels will be needed. New coal fired power may be part of the answer.
Vulnerability to extreme cold first hit hard in the catastrophic Texas 2021 blackout. Blackouts caused by Winter Storm Uri were responsible for hundreds of deaths, with estimates ranging from nearly 250 to over 700, as four million people were without power for days in sub-freezing temperatures. Insurance claims due to damages from the prolonged outages reached $10 billion, according to a lawsuit filed by Texas insurance companies.
The crisis began around 1:00 a.m. on February 15th with no solar power available and low wind. Gas-fired generation became progressively dysfunctional due to the cold. Texas had systematically reduced its reliable baseload power from coal. With 69 percent of generation fueled by natural gas or wind, system failures caused a crisis.
Our national vulnerability became clear in PJM’s near blackout during late 2021 Winter Storm Elliot. With little renewables capacity it was the gas supply system that nearly failed. We now know that switching from coal to gas makes America seriously vulnerable to deadly subzero blackouts.
Unfortunately, Elliot was mild compared to prior storms, and it is these extreme cases of cold that should be the focus of those managing our electricity system. For example Elliot caused a Pittsburgh low temperature of minus 5 but the low in a January 1994 storm was minus 23. Philadelphia saw a low of plus 7 while the 1994 storm hit minus 4. As recently as 2015 the worst storm lows were lower than Elliot but we still had lots of coal power.
According to NERC’s December 2023 Long-Term Reliability Assessment PJM had a comfortable looking 30% reliability reserve margin during “normal” weather. Elliot’s cold simply wiped that out. If it had been a lot colder it surely would have been a lot worse. NERC needs to assess this vulnerability not just that for average weather.
But it is the States that are responsible for generator reliability. Every State should now initiate a cold weather Blackout Prevention Program. This means seriously assessing the vulnerability to at least the extreme cold they have seen before. Then taking the necessary steps to prevent deadly blackouts caused by that cold. In most states these will be below zero temperatures, in many states well below.
In particular it is time to put coal back on the table. Coal power’s on-site supply feature makes it immune to cold weather supply disruptions.
We have not built a coal fired power plant for many years so for a start we will need to find the latest technology. China is likely a leader but India is also a good bet. The Indians are great engineers.
Also coal power had been massively over-regulated so a few repeals are called for. I would begin with the mercury emission limits which EPA gleefully admitted they had no scientific basis for. Likewise for the phantom PM2.5 which is not even a specific substance.
We should also gear back up our coal combustion research. DOE’s Fossil Fuel Program has been misdirected onto carbon capture for many years now. Let’s get back to making power.
Small modular nuclear reactors also fit in here. They too do not have fuel supplies that are vulnerable to extreme cold. And of course the gas supply system should be made less vulnerable.
In short there is a lot of work to be done to protect America from deadly blackouts caused by extreme cold. The threat is clear.
Note: Small portions of this article were adapted from my original call for action in Pennsylvania. See “Avoiding Deadly Blackouts: How to Protect Pennsylvanians During Winter Storms” at https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/research/avoiding-deadly-blackouts/
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“The law of unintended consequences” refers to the idea that actions taken with a specific goal in mind can often lead to unexpected and unforeseen outcomes, which may be positive or negative, meaning that even well-intentioned actions can have unintended results, particularly in complex systems like society or the economy; it essentially warns against assuming that actions will only have the intended effects.
In more lapidary style, the road to Hell was paved with good intentions.
The “Duck Test” says that what’s going on isn’t exactly good intentions as far as the economy is concerned.
America needs a subzero blackout prevention program
The UK, apparently, needs to neutralise Musk – and by extension Trump…
Elon Musk is becoming a one-man rogue state – it’s time we reined him in
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/20/elon-musk-is-becoming-a-one-man-rogue-state-its-time-we-reined-him-in
The writer of that piece, while exoriating Elon Musk, completely ignores the behaviour of Soros, Gates, and the rest of the leftist bazillionaires. Apparently it’s ok for fabulously wealthy Marxists to do all that he’s accusing Musk of doing. But it’s verbotin to push back.
What else did you expect?
Nobody does hypocrisy like the lefties.
The article makes it sound like Musk has a Scrooge McDuck money bin.
I do not know the numbers, but a great majority of Musk’s wealth is the value of the companies he built that employ how many thousands of workers, product products, pay taxes, etc. It is not like Musk could just write a bank draft for $400 billion (or whatever).
The whole article is a piece of wokeshit.
I live at the Southern edge of Texas Hill Country which was hit hard by the 2021 Blackout in Texas. The news we heard here was that there was plenty of natural gas available, but the compressors to distribute the gas were hit by mandatory rolling blackouts which limited the supply to some of the generators. Had better planning for these been implemented, there would have been far more electrical power available, and possibly even enough to prevent the blackouts. Serious problem here included the sub-freezing temperatures that stopped municipal water supplies, and ice ruts on roads that prevented delivery of transportation fuel. All of the local gas stations were without fuel for the whole time after they ran out.
Yes electrification of compressors was an issue in Texas but PJM did not have rolling blackouts and the gas supply system failed anyway. Cold is hell.
Didn’t the electricity go out to the pumping stations? It wasn’t rolling blackouts. It was a blackout.
It started with rolling blackouts some of which shut compressors down taking down gas fired generators. It became a total blackout. Lots of things happened. A nuke tripped, etc.
The compressors (pumping stations) used to be run on nat. gas but the EPA made them convert to “clean” electricity, leading to the deaths in Texas as well as PA.
BINGO!
Wasn’t that at the behest of a black bloke with big ears and a wife called Michael.
We had rolling blackouts, They were bad enough that when the stores had power, they had tot ape shut the doors of their coolers so no one would try to buy the spoiled food inside when the stores were open. Cold is indeed hell. This wasn’t real cold. REAL cold is – 40 and even colder, as I experienced in northern Minnesota growing up. We never had rolling blackouts there and went to school every day. Houses with natural gas heating stayed warm, too.
“Had better planning for these been implemented”
Sure, just keep my congressman out of it.
Ah come on folks, I live a half hours drive from the Canadian border where Winter temps regularly drop well below zero. Let me assure you that reliable electric and natural gas distribution in quite cold temperatures is a solved problem. It does require spending a bit of money (about $0.0001 per cubic foot?) to winterize the system which the utilities in Texas were apparently reluctant to do. Their captive regulators (who resigned and vanished from the face of the planet about 36 hours after temperatures dropped below zero in 1921) went along with that. I suppose that living in a place where Summers are hotter than Hell and about seven months long, encourages one to believe that cold weather is a thing of the past. Global warming or not, if it has been below 0F in a given location in the past, It’s only sensible to design systems assuming that it might get at least that cold and maybe a bit colder again. I believe that’s called engineering.
Good article. The primary cause of the shut down of gas generation in Texas during Uri was the rolling blackouts implemented by ERCOT. ERCOT had no idea that many pipelines carrying fuel to generators were run by electricity and that when the electricity stopped, the gas flow stoppedf and water in the gas stream froze and blocked the pipelines. The RRC has now implemented a program of winterization, but the real issue was the dearth of wind and solar combined with uninformed action by ERCOT.
See my note above. When the power went out, the gas compressors shut down. Articles I read analyzing the problem referred back to Obama insisting the compressors convert to electricity. Apparently with no gas backup.
Discussing these engineering details is necessary, but not to the exclusion of recognizing ancient wisdom like the risk of “putting all your eggs in one basket.”
Single point failures. Cascading failures. All are known by engineers. Engineers also know their job is to identify and resolve problems with their hands tied by people who know nothing.
In the olden days, electric utilities would tout their “all of the above” power supplies: coal, oil, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro. Each had its vulnerabilities but it was assumed conditions would not all be present at the same time.
Now, we have almost eliminated coal, nuclear and hydro are stagnant, oil is rarely used, and we use non-firm natural gas for a large portion of our electric supply. Oh, and let’s not forget vast amount of money being spent on undependable sources (you know who you are).
California has quietly built a number of medium size diesel powered generator stations for emergency backup.
But this was not PJM’s problem.
An “all of the above” strategy for generating electricity makes sense to me. The old motto, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” symbolizes the risk of becoming too dependent on one resource.
A steady electricity supply is too important to become vulnerable to a single technology — or even two, as in the push to “transition” the entire system to wind and solar. “Transitioning” away from reliable generation to intermittent generation is wishful thinking bordering on superstition.
Public animosity to fossil fuels has become so dogmatic that it’s morphed into a Neo-Prohibitionist movement to abandon combustion fuels entirely. That is never going to happen. Unfortunately, as pundit Dorothy Parker quipped a century ago, “You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.”
There’s a similar movement afoot to demonize and eliminate “processed foods.” “Processed” is never clearly defined. No matter — the zealots are against it. That movement won’t fly, either. Most so-called food is stuff that isn’t edible until it’s been “processed.” You can’t eat raw wheat off the stalks like birds, and you can’t survive only on raw fruits and vegetables, either.
Both these back-to-nature sentiments are likely to absorb a lot of wasted time and energy, until common sense can prevail.
I used to like the words “all of the above strategy”, until I realized it made me a wind and solar advocate if I said it honestly. Taken to its literal meaning, if someone proposes cars that run on grape jelly, then “all of the above” supports that too.
So the expression “all of the above” can’t really mean what its words literally mean, so to say things carefully I can’t use that phrase. In the end it is a conversation starter where the other person is invited to discover what the speaker personally includes as part of “all of the above” and what that speaker considers silly grape jelly.
I started writing my response to your first post before I saw this.
You are correct and I agree.
You are dependent on air. What is your other resource? Just a nit.
You can eat raw meat of course, but the first step is to process it, aka dressing the carcass.
We have been operating on a single system concept of steam turbine generation for a long time. Sure there were other systems, but the bulk of it was coal and natural gas. We have been and still are dependent on that type of generation.
The problem is the rush to transition. Solar and wind all are niche technologies, as opposed to grid scale technologies. They have benefits that, if properly inserted, are realized. But those applications are not to replace, but to augment. There are limits, one is not too much or it will negatively affect baseline power generators. Say the number is 10% (it will be different everywhere). So you have solar that can reduce fuel by 10% when the sun is shining but does not degrade the natural gas generators (ignore the cold weather disruption for this thought). Once the sunk money invested to deploy the solar, energy costs to the customer go down when the sun shine. That is a proven system as I can vouch from my reduced electrical bill.
Incremental improvements. Technological evolution and advancement. All good.
Step functions always result in instability. Ask anyone who got a passing grade in control theory/systems engineering.
A perfect example of taking a descriptive word totally out of context in order to straw man the topic.
About 30 years ago the area I live in – Indian Wells Valley, CA – had the NG system failed by extreme cold during the Christmas holiday. I don’t remember the exact cause of the shut down, but the high desert experienced several consecutive days of sub-zero temps. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there, or I would have shut our water off. We came home to a 4″ thick glacier covering our driveway. We got off pretty easily with just a couple breaks on the exterior water circuit. It was a minor disaster for the area with many homes being heavily water damaged from interior breaks. Not a good Christmas for many.
I guess solar and wind is not so sustainable after all, kinda like shovel ready jobs, amirite Barack?
Well… shovel ready jobs… didn’t they replace all those old bridges so the transportation engineering society gives us an A+ now?
Excellent piece, I agree 100%. Having lived thru (and survived) a good number of arctic outbreaks
over the years they are not to be taken lightly. It’s all about the “base load”. And have a
backup system or two.
“Cold kills and America is at great risk of deadly subzero blackouts.”
Just ordered a generator- my electrician will install it after the holidays. I have enough problems without having an electricity black out.
Hey Joseph. Do you have heat from NG or from stored fuel like propane or heating oil? I have only NG for heating. If that goes out and I need some heat it will be by running one of my propane generators outside and using it to power a resistive heater inside. Not ideal, but very cold is kind of rare here. BTW, I will not run a portable propane heater inside, I’ve had my eyelashes removed with one or those.
I have an oil furnace. The generator is fairly large and will be wired into my electrical box- not all of the circuits but most of them. It’ll run outside the garage and plug into a box the electrician will install just outside the garage. It’s the inverter type- which supposedly is quieter and runs more efficiently than the non inverter type- with “cleaner” electricity. I don’t really understand any of this- just doing as recommended by the electrician- a retired guy who is my age, 75. I like the fact that he has a lot of experience. He lives nearby and does small projects for people in the area.
I take it as long as you can power the controls of your furnace you will have oil on hand to burn and stay warm. Up in my mountain cabin I’ve a pile of firewood to run in a woodstove. I’ve also a 200 gallon propane tank for the water heater and the kitchen stove. We occasionally brave the winter cold up there (6400′) for a few days at a time. At first, I used to turn on the (hard plumbed) ventless propane heater to break the chill on arrival but now we just get the woodstove going asap.
Ventless propane heaters are no longer permitted in Kali – our propane provider that needed to check our tank and system made a show of “not seeing” it. I’ve always been a bit uneasy with mine, so now we just mill around for a couple hours in down parkas as the woodstove gets rolling. I did play with the idea of using a portable propane heater to warm up the back bedrooms just before bedtime. In that process I had a leak build up that, to the alarm and amusement of my onlooking daughter, enveloped me in a small fireball that removed some facial hair. That episode, and a local trailer/cabin burn down due to a portable malfunction, shut that plan down.
A portable propane heater makes it possible to take showers in the winter (for the bathroom air temperature). They can work quite well with just a little attention to details.
JZ sounds like a whole-house generator, right? I recommend at least looking at an automatic transfer switch. My generator is set for a 10-second delay, then it starts and switches automatically. No need for me to do anything.
“We need a program to address ”
No thanks
An engineering solution as opposed to a political program. Yup.
It will take a law to make the utilities admit this threat exists. But who can vote against a subzero blackout prevention law?
Story tip – Detroit unveils final designs for first 3 solar neighborhoods – WDET 101.9 FM
so i wounder which system will hit the reality wall first…detroits or ann arbors
https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/ann-arbor-hopes-bring-rooftop-solar-masses-creating-utility
😆. Lot of good that’ll do.
“We should also gear back up our coal combustion research.”
In a college chemistry class in the early 1960s the class visited a research center in Pittsburgh PA. This was likely the Bureau of Mines Experiment Station in Bruceton {10 miles south of P}. We were being exposed to “wet-chemistry” in class. The researchers showed us their newest tool that used a half-dollar pill of crushed coal to determine its constituents in a matter of minutes. The following week, we were back in the lab pursuing the insights of wet-chemistry.
I was a civil engineering student at Carnegie Tech at the time. The Bureau was highly respected. Now much missed.
Is there a need to ramp up the importance of proper, reliable design of electrical supply systems?
It is easy, even trite, to say that “cold kills”. At a personal level, a friend or relative close to you who dies in a blackout naturally raises questions of “Could this death have been prevented?” and “Who is responsible for this power failure?”
In normal society, every death is examined in some detail, for various reasons. Yet, death from a cold snap in a power failure tends to be less closely examined. We are not seeing Coroners reporting these as involving any criminality, so they get a light treatment and end up in bland statistics.
My preference would go deeper. It will generally be the case that the actions of another person(s) caused or contributed to the death. A person whose actions caused death would commonly be examined for manslaughter or murder to some degree. Scenarios are possible. When the available engineering advice is overturned and ideology or personal preference prevails, I suggest that there should be criminal investigations.
These can be to the point, as in the scenario where an identified policy maker caused a power supply failure (such as ordering that valves on gas pipelines be powered electrically and not by gas); or they can be more general, such as when an authority orders the filming and publicity of blowing up a coal power station because of a belief that coal is evil – are such acts running foul of misinformation laws?
The important point is to minimise deaths from blackouts caused by known poor practice or policy by holding people accountable for deaths. Public prosecutors need to examine murder and manslaughter seriously, not with some climate change ideology justifying special treatment of the law. Hold murderers accountable. Geoff S
Very nice David.
I spent 35 years in the electric utility industry and retired in 2016. When I started the industry was still using the vertically integrated business model meaning that each utility was solely responsible for production, transmission and distribution functions in return for what was a government sanctioned monopoly to serve a certain geographic area. Emphasis was on cost and reliability. Have a widespread outage due to poor resource planning or system maintenance and you got your ass hauled up before the state PUC or even worse, the state legislature. That model had been in place for many decades and somehow managed to work pretty well. Maybe time to try that again.
You forgot Japan, which may have the best coal power plant technology yet available.