Large swathes of the East Coast narrowly avoided a Christmas network catastrophe like the one that hit Texas less than two years ago. Even so, hundreds of thousands of customers in North and South Carolina experienced holiday blackouts of hours with little attention during freezing temperatures — blackouts that, utility officials said, helped preserve the integrity of the larger network.
On Tuesday, representatives of Duke Energy, one of the largest utilities in the country, witnessed to the North Carolina Utilities Commission to explain why they cut power to approximately 500,000 homes and businesses in North and South Carolina, about 15% of utility consumption total customer baseamid falling temperatures on Christmas Eve.
According to Duke representatives, the blackouts were necessary to save energy during the cold snap, which increased demand by up to 10% over predicted models. Bloomberg reported. At the hearing, the company described a series of unfortunate events – including equipment freezes at coal and natural gas facilities and software outages – that led to the problems. In several southeastern states, fossil fuel generation dropped sharply during the holiday cold snap, up to 68%as coal and gas facilities were damaged by high winds and bitter cold.
What else, NC policy surveillance reports that customers in the Carolinas said Duke barely warned them about the rotating power outages, and that while customers were told the blackouts would only last between 15 and 30 minutes, some were without power for hours on Christmas Eve . The utility said a software bug that otherwise helps manage ongoing power outages failed, meaning the utility had to manually restore power to multiple customers and it took much longer to turn the lights back on.
It wasn’t like the storm was unpredictable, far from it. By the time Duke cut its power on Christmas Eve, forecasters were already warning of days of severe cold and wind waves across much of the country. And increased demand during a holiday that falls on a weekend is normal, but Duke said his models didn’t sufficiently predict the amount of actual demand at Christmas.
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But according to Duke, cutting power in the Carolinas at the last minute was necessary to preserve the integrity of a much larger system. The power outage in Duke’s service area may have disrupted power supplies to the Eastern Interconnection grid, one of the nation’s two main electrical grids, which was at risk as power demand spiked in several states over the Christmas holiday. If the grid had collapsed in the Carolinas, Duke said, it could have caused outages throughout the larger system.
“His description of events is disturbing and frightening,” said Charlotte Mitchell, chair of the Utilities Commission. said Duke representatives at the Jan. 3 meeting as they discussed what could have happened to Eastern Interconnection’s system. “We need to understand what happened here to prevent it from happening again.”
During the cold snap, neighboring utilities also worked overtime and some also cut power to customers: The Tennessee Valley Authority instituted blackouts for the first time in its history, Tennessee reported. The geographic spread of the cold snap and the stress it caused to other utilities made Duke unable to buy extra power from any other supplier – a move that utilities often make when there is a lot of demand for the power they have.
Temperatures on Christmas Eve hit lows of 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-12.2 degrees Celsius) in Raleigh and 9 degrees Fahrenheit (-12.7 degrees Celsius) in Charlotte, far from record lows of -9 degrees Fahrenheit (-22.8 degrees Celsius) degrees Celsius) and -5 degrees Fahrenheit (-20.6 degrees Celsius) set in the mid-1980s. But, the utility said, the inability to buy power from neighboring suppliers, coupled with increased demand thanks to the weekend holiday of the week, generated a mad rush, regardless of the temperature.
This difficult situation is part of a larger conversation about the state of the aging US power grid and adds to other difficult situations across the country this summer, as high heat threatened electrical systems in several states. Certain aspects of this mini-crisis – especially the freezing of natural gas facilities – are also reminiscent of the deadly winter storm in Texas, where frozen natural gas equipment, among a multitude of other issuescaused a multi-day blackout that left hundreds dead.
In one of its statements, Duke made it clear what was not an issue during the storm: “The outages did not occur because of renewable energy generation,” the company said. After the deadly Texas winter storm, despite natural gas bearing much of the blame, Republican lawmakers used the crisis to attack renewable energy. Let’s hope Carolina lawmakers have a little more common sense.
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