NERC Says Forced Outages are at Historically High Levels
Image courtesy of Joachim Aspenlaub Blattboldt under Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivs 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
The North America Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) recently published its 2024 State of Reliability (SOR) report, and the news around forced outages is disturbing. Simply put, forced-outage rates were at historically high levels in 2022 and 2023. Let’s take a peek behind the data to see what’s driving this trend.
Drivers of the Increased Level of Forced Outages
One reason for the forced-outage trend is the fact that aging coal plants are increasingly unreliable due to cycling increases and deferred maintenance. This has led to a forced-outage rate for coal of nearly 12% in 2023, up from the 10% average from 2014-2022. Unfortunately, this cycle of deferred maintenance is inevitable because coal plants are being phased out.
Adding insult to injury is that many of these coal plant retirements are being replaced with a mix of inverter-based resources which have had their own reliability issues – specifically, solar, wind and battery generation sources have been found to trip offline or lower output in response to grid anomalies. Making matters worse is that a Dec. 2023 NERC report found that some owners/operators of these systems have failed to follow voluntary operational guidelines, putting over 5,200 MWs at risk.
But it’s not just old coal plants that are experiencing this trend – wind power’s forced-outage rate is continuing to increase as well, up to 18.9% in 2023 compared to 18.1% in 2022. For comparative purposes, the 2023 forced-outage rate was about 8% for natural gas, 6.7% for hydro, and less than 2% for nuclear.
In the final analysis, the 2024 SOR report makes it clear that reliability is destined to become increasingly challenging going forward. This means that emergency preparedness will become more and more important as well. Simply put, it’s not possible to fully corral instances of forced outages, but with a solid emergency plan in place (as well as an optimized regimen of training, exercises and drills), at least we can minimize the impact.
