NERC Winter Storm Elliott Report Identifies Outage Root Causes
Image courtesy of Stanley Zimny under Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License, resized to 700 x 391 pixels.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), in conjunction with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), recently released its 167-page Winter Storm Elliott Report. The report identified the main reasons why millions of customers across Texas and elsewhere found themselves without power last December. It boiled down to a natural gas infrastructure failure.
Conclusions from the Winter Storm Elliott Report
The NERC/FERC report calculated that the incident caused 90,500 MW of unplanned outages, which the report deemed “unprecedented.” And natural gas accounted for a whopping 63% of that total.
Winter Storm Elliott caused temperatures to plunge, freezing natural gas wellheads and other equipment. Making matters worse is that the roads were, for a time, difficult to navigate, which hindered crews’ ability to travel to compromised locations and address the problems.
Overall, gas production declined 16% during the course of the storm, with some areas such as the Appalachian Basin declining over 50%. This was attributable to 3 main factors: mechanical and electrical glitches accounted for 41% of the problems, freezing accounted for 31% of the problems, and fuel issues accounted for 24% of the problems. Other secondary causes included safety issues (2%), transmission issues (1%) and the dreaded miscellaneous issues (1%).
So, the good news is that you can’t fix problems you don’t know about, so the identification of these root causes is a great first step toward facilitating positive change. Hopefully, utilities and regulators will heed the warning and figure out how to upgrade and winterize electrical infrastructure, including power plant winterization, to prevent a repeat occurrence in the future.
With that being said, NERC has previously plead with Congress to take steps toward developing reliability standards for natural gas infrastructure, and that plea was completely ignored. As an emergency preparedness professional, I sincerely hope that the newly released Winter Storm Elliott Report will serve as the wake-up call necessary to take action.
