The Power Grid Just Passed Its Biggest Test in Years

The eastern United States just made it through a snowy, sleet-filled, and very frigid few weeks.

It tested adults and kids and local governments. It also tested the power grid — and gave us a view of what the grid’s biggest challenges might look like in the future.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse announce some news about the show — and also debrief on how the Northeastern U.S. power grid performed during the past few weeks of unusually intense winter weather. They discuss why wintertime electricity demand is especially important to manage, whether it’s bad that New England got a whopping 40% of its electricity from oil, and how the region’s new transmission line to Quebec performed during the freeze. They also chat about how zero-carbon electricity could help manage grid stress.

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Robinson Meyer: Let’s zoom in on two specific challenges that New England in particular experienced during this winter storm. The first is something I referenced in the intro, which is that at peak, New England was actually generating 40% of its electricity from oil and really from diesel, which is crazy. I mean, oil and diesel, I think it’s crazy.

Jesse Jenkins: For me, I’m like- Everybody else thinks it’s crazy. I’ll tell you why I don’t think it’s crazy in a minute.

Meyer: Okay, well, let’s talk about this is a throwback. I mean you look at 40% of New England’s electricity coming from oil. This is like a throwback and, to the 1970s when the U.S. got a ton of electricity from oil, really only effectively cut off by the beginning of the Arab oil embargo and the energy crisis in the 1970s, ultimately prompting a return to coal, at least way back then.

I don’t know. I look at this and I go, something really has gone wrong. If New England’s getting 40% of its electricity from oil, that’s like the most possible polluting thing other than coal you could generate electricity from. But what do you think? I don’t know.

Jenkins: I look at it and I say, that’s probably what the future is going to look like in a lot more places across the country if we transition to a winter peaking system. And here’s why. So yeah, 40%, but for how many hours? For a week? For two weeks? That’s probably half a percent to one and a half percent of annual generation in New England.

So a lot of capacity, very little energy, right? That’s the perfect thing for peaking, right? And for prolonged to events like this. The alternative to that is you oversize gas pipelines and you oversize gas production to meet that extra 40% of New England generation that only occurs once every two years for 1% of the hours of the year. While there has been local environmental opposition and political opposition to building greater pipelines into the Northeast, the economics of that also don’t necessarily line up.

Gas generators had the option in New England to sign firm gas contracts that would have meant they were uninterruptible by local distribution companies. Those firm gas contracts could then help finance new gas pipeline construction or expansion. They chose not to do that. They chose instead to install oil tanks, diesel tanks on site, and to convert to dual fuel generators for these kinds of circumstances.

And the reason for that is that when you’re dealing with this sort of very infrequent event, what you want is something that costs very little upfront, but maybe has a very high variable cost when you consume it because you’re not going to consume very much of it, and you’re going to do it very infrequently. And so you don’t want a big fixed cost just sitting there all the time. Well, guess what a gas pipeline is? A giant fixed cost sitting there all the time.

Oil, on the other hand, is a consumable. It’s very expensive. Power prices go up when we’re using it, right? They’re a couple hundred dollars a megawatt hour at least. But you can store many days worth of fuel on site in oil tanks in a fairly compact landscape.

Oil is our default long duration energy storage right now, right? Until we invent something better and cleaner. And so for these kinds of rare events that only happen a couple percent of the hours of the year, just like we would like to have more batteries and more long duration energy storage to replace this in the near term, this is a sensible way to manage gas pipeline capacity peaks, right? Otherwise, we’re building, I don’t know what percentage, maybe 10% more total gas pipeline capacity. And that extra 10% increment, we’re basically never using. We don’t need it in the summer. We only need it 1% or 2% of the times when the system is at the sort of peak stress.

And so it’s a very logical economic solution to this problem. And while yes, it is dirty during the periods when we’re burning that oil, we are burning very little of it and for very short periods of time. You know, it’s a week or two every couple of years.

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned:

Why winter is becoming a tough time for the power grid

New England turned to oil-burning power plants during the cold snap

Quebec stopped sending hydropower during the Arctic storm

PJM’s review of its January cold weather operations

Previously on Shift Key: The Startup Trying to Put Geothermal Heat Pumps in America’s Homes

An early review (and photos) of the Rivian R2

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...

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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.