Over 1M NY Con Ed customers nearly lost heat for months in storm last Christmas — and worse may be yet to come: report
More than a million Con Ed customers came dangerously close to being left without heat for months after last year’s deadly Winter Storm Elliot triggered widespread power outages — and worse may be yet to come, according to recent reports from top energy regulators.
A joint investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC) found that Elliott was the fifth winter event in 11 years where blackouts threatened the electric grid.
One of the problems was that the wells in the Marcellus and Utica Shale formations, which hold large reserves of natural gas, froze at the height of the storm, slashing production by more than half in some instances.
The plunging natural gas supply significantly reduced the pressure in interstate pipelines that supply New York City via its utility, Con Edison.
Con Edison was forced to limit the supply of gas to some customers and bring online a liquefied natural gas plant.
Had it not taken those steps, regulators concluded that Con Edison “could have faced an unprecedented loss of its entire system that, in this worst case scenario, would have taken months to restore,” according to the assessment.
The outage would have left more than a million of the power company’s customers in New York City and nearby areas without heat “while the outside temperature was in the single digits, for months.”
“We narrowly dodged a crisis last year. Had the weather not warmed up on Christmas Day, it is highly likely that natural gas service would have been disrupted to New York City,” said NERC president and CEO Jim Robb.
Regulators urged US Congress and state lawmakers to establish reliability rules for natural gas infrastructure, covering cold weather preparedness, regional coordination and critical infrastructure.
“Someone must have authority to establish and enforce gas reliability standards,” said FERC chairman Willie Phillips, stressing the need to protect fuel supply to natural gas-fired power plants during extreme cold weather.
The FERC and NERC also recommended better enforcement of standards, technical review of outages to identify precautions, improved communication between gas distributors and grid operators, and studying the need for more gas infrastructure.
Elliott resulted in at least 28 deaths and left hundreds of thousands of people on the East Coast without power. Nearly two-thirds of the US was under extreme weather warnings, leading to unexpected energy generation supply losses.
As the temperatures outside plunged and the demand for heat spiked, 18 percent of the entire country’s gas generators failed, either because of technical glitches or a lack of fuel.
The regulators’ 168-page report published last month notes that it was “especially disconcerting that it happened in the Eastern Interconnection which normally has ample generation and transmission ties to other grid operators that allow them to import and export power.”
Nearly a year after Winter Storm Elliot, much of the US power grid is still at an increased risk of having insufficient energy supplies to meet higher demand in extreme conditions — a worrying prospect in light of forecasts predicting that this winter will be colder and snowier than the last in many parts of the US.
In a separate 2023-2024 Winter Reliability Assessment released by NERC on Nov. 8, the regulators warned that while power grids can handle normal winter conditions, “any prolonged, wide-area cold snaps will be challenging due to generator outages and fuel vulnerability.”
“Extreme cold weather events can cause electricity demand to deviate significantly from historical forecasts,” said Mark Olson, NERC’s manager of reliability assessments. “The growth of intermittent resources, like solar generation, on the distribution system significantly increases load forecasting complexity and uncertainty.”
“Once again, we strongly recommend that operators take the necessary steps to prepare for winter,” he added.
