More than 300 million people in the US and Canada face the growing possibility of electricity shortages beginning as early as 2024 and continuing to 2028.
In a recent , the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) – an international regulatory authority overseeing the North American power grid – projected that a majority of regions in the US and Canada will have insufficient electricity supply to reliably meet demand during extreme weather conditions. A few may even see interruptions under normal weather conditions.
“I think it is striking that the majority of regions are at an elevated or high level of risk,” says at the Niskanen Center, an environmental think tank based in Washington DC. “This should not be the norm and is quite a frightening assessment heading into the unknowns of another winter.”
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The report found that North America’s peak demand – the highest amount of electricity needed in a given period – is rising faster than at any time in the past five years. The sharp increase also represents a reversal of a decades-long trend involving falling or flat growth in demand.
New York state, New England and the entire western US along with some of the most populous Canadian regions, such as Ontario and British Columbia, are at “elevated risk” of experiencing electricity shortfalls during summer heatwaves or winter storms.
But two central US regions have been designated by NERC as being at “high risk” of disruptions even in normal weather. One of these stretches from the US-Canadian border in Michigan and Minnesota to Louisiana on the country’s southern Gulf Coast, and the other encompasses Tennessee along with portions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Kentucky.
It is hard to say how long these disruptions may last, as the industry standards meant to limit shortfalls are based on the “1-in-10 rule”. Some interpret this as allowing one day of outages every 10 years, while others suggest it allows for only one disruption event – no matter how long – in that period.
One issue contributing to the problem is the supply of energy, regardless of demand. As power plants that run on fossil fuels are retired, they aren’t being replaced with renewable energy sources at the same pace, said at NERC during a media briefing on 13 December.
Challenges around agreeing on routes for transmission lines and getting the required permits have delayed connecting new renewable energy sources to the US power grid. A nationwide power transformer shortage is further complicating these efforts.
At the same time, there has been a spike in demand for electricity. Cryptocurrency mining facilities, which use a lot of energy, are expanding in several states, particularly Texas. And companies are rapidly building more warehouse-sized data centres, along with battery and automotive manufacturing facilities, according to the consulting firm . The estimates that US data centre power consumption could double by 2030. “I think the data centre energy growth is surprising a lot of people in how quickly that showed up,” says at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group based in New York.
The broader push for the electrification of heating and transportation systems – including electric cars – is also creating new winter peaks in electricity demand beyond those seen in the summer with increased air conditioning use.
Natural gas has been seen as a “bridge fuel” in the transition to renewable power, said at NERC during the media briefing. And it accounts for 40 to 80 per cent of the electricity supply during cold months across the US and Canada. But as the winter peak demand has grown, the natural gas supply chain hasn’t been reliable. Companies have struggled to keep power plants, pipelines and gas production wells operating in cold temperatures due to equipment failures and frozen wellheads.
“The natural gas plants, for the most part, are relying on fuel being delivered almost in real time,” says Rutigliano. “The system that delivers fuel doesn’t have to meet the same reliability standards as the electric grid, and, in many cases, there’s no real way to guarantee that fuel is available for the gas plants in the winter.”
The result is that North American electricity supply has become practically inseparable from the natural gas supply chain, said Moura. That means a reliable electricity supply that lowers the risk of power outages depends on implementing reliability standards for the natural gas industry moving forward.
