Natural gas infrastructure – pipelines, producing wells, and generating plants – were the chief culprits in Winter Storm Elliott last Christmas “that contributed to power outages for millions of electricity customers in the Eastern half of the country,” the staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. found in a 167-page report released last week (Nov. 7).
Nor was that an isolated event in the U.S., noting that the event “was the fifth in the past 11 years in which unplanned cold weather-related generation outages jeopardized grid reliability.”
The report repeats a prior ignored plea for Congress to act on setting reliability standards for natural gas infrastructure.
According to the report, the severe storm during the Christmas holiday season saw 90,500 MW of unplanned outages, which it described as “unprecedented.” The study found, “The coincident incremental unplanned generation outages alone represented 13 percent of the U.S. portion of the winter 2022-2023 anticipated generation resources in the Eastern Interconnection.”
Elliott’s deep freeze “caused unplanned outages of natural gas wellheads due to wellhead freeze-offs and other frozen equipment. Weather-related poor road conditions prevented necessary maintenance.” Gas production fell 16% from the start of the storm, with the greatest declines in the Marcellus and Utica Devonian shale formations in the Appalachian Basin of “23 to 54 percent during the event.”
Of the Elliott generation failures – “outages, derates, and failures to start” – natural gas accounted for 63%, followed by coal and lignite-fueled plants. The failures, the report found, resulted from three issues: freezing (31%), fuel (24%), and mechanical/electrical issues (41%). Freezing and fuel problems accounted for most of those failures (55%). Failures caused by mechanical and electrical issues, the staff found, “also indicated a clear pattern related to cold temperatures – as temperatures decreased, the number of generating units experiencing an outage, derate or failure to start due to mechanical/electrical issues increased.”