The Christmas holiday winter storm was the latest showcase into how unreliable our grid has become.
PJM Interconnection LLC—the regional grid operator for Pennsylvania—issued a Cold Weather Alert to notify power generators that their electricity would be needed during the upcoming holiday weekend’s surge in demand. PJM pays power generators billions of dollars every year to reserve their availability.
Unfortunately, the record high reserves and the alert to Pennsylvania’s power plants weren’t enough. Many of the power plants PJM was counting on ended up not running. These “forced outages” aren’t necessarily surprising—under normal weather conditions, plants fail to run about 5 percent of the times they are called. Power plants run large, complicated machines and, during extreme weather, the forced outage rate can be as much as 10 percent.
As a result of this crisis, energy prices soared to record highs. During the storm, wholesale electricity prices shot up to a staggering $4,300 per MWh, compared to less than $50 per MWh under normal conditions. For consumers paying market rates for electricity plans, the cost may be severe. But even consumers on fixed-rate plans—which most residential customers are—may end up feeling the effects.
The fracked gas industry will claim that the solution is more fracking and more pipelines. That makes no sense at all. In addition to the obvious environmental and public health consequences of fracking, the economics just don’t work. We would need to spend billions of dollars to over-build vast amounts of infrastructure to guard against relatively rare shortages, causing an unsustainable glut in the gas market and consumers paying the hefty price.
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