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.”
Among a series of mostly technical and administrative recommendations, the FERC-NERC report has a major policy item: “Legislation by Congress and state legislatures (and/or regulation by entities with jurisdiction over natural gas infrastructure reliability) is needed to establish reliability rules for natural gas infrastructure necessary to support the grid and natural gas local distribution companies….”
This is largely a reprise of a recommendation in a 2021 joint FERC-NERC report on a February deep freeze in Texas and the 25 other states. That report recommended that “Congress, state legislatures, and regulatory agencies with jurisdiction over natural gas infrastructure facilities should require those natural gas infrastructure facilities to implement and maintain cold weather preparedness plans, including measures to prepare to operate when specific cold weather events are forecast.”
The 2021 recommendation went nowhere. The new recommendation notes, “Congress could consider whether additional or exclusive authority for natural gas infrastructure reliability should be placed within a single federal agency, as it did with bulk power system reliability in 2005, when it added Federal Power Act section 215.”
“Someone must have authority to establish and enforce gas reliability standards” FERC Chairman Willie Phillips
Commenting on the latest attempt to gain attention in Congress, FERC Chairman Willie Phillips said, “I want everyone to take time during this Reliability Week to read this report and begin implementing these recommendations, particularly those addressing the interdependence of gas and electricity. The report highlights what I’ve called for before: Someone must have authority to establish and enforce gas reliability standards.”
NERC CEO Jim Robb added, “I echo the chairman’s call for an authority to set and enforce winterization standards for the natural gas system upstream of power generation and local distribution. The unplanned loss of generation due to freezing and fuel issues was unprecedented, reflecting the extraordinary interconnectedness of the gas and electric systems and their combined vulnerability to extreme weather.”
–Kennedy Maize