Winter storms will take down wires due to wind and especially ice but it's the cold that pushes the entire system to its limits.
And unfortunately the high-pressure systems that follow the storm mean no wind for the wind turbines and with solar panels covered with snow and that damnable ice, plus natural gas freeze-offs*, capacity gets whacked at the exact time demand spikes.
From Bloomberg via Canada's Financial Post, January 26:
US power grids are under mounting pressure following a winter storm that unleashed deep cold and heavy snow and ice from Texas to Maine, driving up heating demand and raising the risk of blackouts.
US power grids are under mounting pressure following a winter storm that unleashed deep cold and heavy snow and ice from Texas to Maine, driving up heating demand and raising the risk of blackouts.
The storm affected millions of people across the eastern two-thirds of the US, with 813,000 homes and businesses were without electricity as of 11:00 a.m. New York time as snow and ice ravaged local distribution lines, according to PowerOutage.us. More than half of the outages were reported in three states: Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.
So far, power grids have avoided large system-level cuts, but sub-zero temperatures and dangerous wind chills are set to linger all week, testing seasonal power demand records from Texas to New England. Some areas have reported extensive damage to trees and power lines and blocked roads, which could slow electricity restoration, said Nicole Joniak, a meteorologist at AccuWeather Inc.
“Power may take days to be restored across the hardest hit areas,” she said. “This will be especially dangerous, as temperatures will be well below historical averages across much of the eastern and central United States this week.”
PJM Interconnection — the operator of the largest US grid, which stretches from New Jersey to Illinois — declared a level-1 emergency for Tuesday, which means every power plant that serves the region is required to be ready to run full-tilt.
More than an inch of ice blanketed the Southern Plains and Southeast, including parts of Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, Joniak said. The northeast had the heaviest snow, with more than 23 inches (58 centimeters) in New Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In New York City, 11.4 inches fell in Central Park, according to AccuWeather....
*....“This deep freeze is hurting production, especially for natural gas,” Price Futures Group analyst Phil Flynn wrote in his daily market commentary. ”Daily output is taking a hit, with losses soaring to as much as 10 billion cubic feet a day at peak times! Even under more moderate scenarios, we’re seeing production drops between 0.2 and 2.5 billion cubic feet per day across the hardest-hit regions, starting around January 20–22 and sticking around through January 31,” Flynn wrote.The culprit is "freeze-offs" that occur when water or hydrates, produced along with natural gas, freeze and then solidify during periods of extreme cold. They create blockages that disrupt flows from wellheads at the processing facilities where impurities are removed, as well as inside pipelines that supply gas-fired power generation plants and industrial users.
Freeze-offs played a role in a 2021 winter storm in Texas that made headlines for leaving millions of people without power for days. According to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, freeze-offs caused a 45% drop in Texas natural gas production over a five-day period.
The study found 87% of unplanned outages at electricity generation plants in Texas were due to insufficient supplies of natural gas, caused mostly by freeze-offs at the wellhead where it is produced and at nearby processing plants.
The storm resulted in between $80 billion and $130 billion in financial losses to the Texas economy and killed at least 210 people, according to Glenn Hegar, the state’s comptroller of public accounts, in a report prepared in 2021....
—The Center Square, "Winter weather to disrupt U.S. gas production, increase prices", January 23
