More than a dozen states where data centers are spreading fastest could face electric power emergencies under extreme conditions this winter, the grid’s security monitor warned Tuesday.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp. said regions that face “elevated” risks of power shortages include New England, the Carolinas, parts of the Tennessee Valley region, most of Texas, several eastern Rocky Mountain states and the Pacific Northwest. Canada’s Maritime Provinces have the same outlook.
If such emergencies arise, power grid operators would have to rely on combinations of increased electricity imports from their neighbors — if available — and cutbacks by customers, NERC said, with rotating blackouts as a last resort.
Peak winter demand across the North American regions has risen by 20 gigawatts, or 2.5 percent, since last winter, a sudden escalation after years when annual peak demand grew 1 percent or less a year. The increases “are most concentrated in the U.S. West, Southeast and mid-Atlantic areas … areas where a lot of data center development is occurring,” said Mark Olson, NERC manager of reliability assessments.
NERC’s forecast said that all regions are expected to have adequate power supplies in normal winter conditions. The increased risk forecast is rated a low-probability, once-in-a-decade threat, NERC added, but it noted these vulnerabilities are increasing. “Four severe Arctic storms have descended to cover much of North America since 2021, causing regional demand for electricity and heating fuel to soar and exposing generation and fuel infrastructure in temperate areas to freezing conditions,” NERC said.
In some regions, elevated risks would result from a combination of unusually fierce and sustained winter weather assaults and sharp reductions in solar and wind power caused by storm effects, NERC reported. Several grid regions have downgraded the power generation capacity of wind and solar generation in the worst blizzard hours, when wind turbine blades may freeze and solar panels become snow-covered, and these assessments were included in this year’s NERC report.
The downgrades could invite renewed criticism of renewable power by Trump administration officials, who have called wind and solar energy intrinsically unreliable, although the renewable energy resources operate as expected in normal conditions.
The NERC report stresses that natural gas generation — the largest source of U.S. electric power that is heralded by the Trump administration — is also vulnerable in winter.
“Natural gas is an essential fuel for electricity generation in winter,” the NERC report noted. Gas distribution companies with long-term contracts with suppliers have first call on scarce gas flows, leaving many power generators without such contracts in dire straits during severe storms.
The grid monitor also commented that the absence of regulatory oversight of gas operations can leave grid operators uncertain about gas supply in emergency conditions. “Evidence from the past two winters indicates notable improvement in the delivery of natural gas to [gas-fired grid] generators,” NERC said. “Still, natural gas infrastructure freeze protection mitigations are voluntary for the natural gas industry in most of North America, resulting in … continued supply risks during extreme conditions.”
The inability of gas and grid sectors to align their operations to counter threats of shortages has been an issue for more than a dozen years, building to crises during Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and Winter Storm Elliott the following year.
In the most recent effort to create closer collaboration, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners issued results this month from its multiyear deliberations. It recommended that more gas pipelines and gas storage should be used to address extreme weather threats to gas and grid operations. It did not support recommendations from other expert reviews that gas supply operations should be federally regulated to assure security, as high voltage power flows are.
In counting 9.4 GW in net new power resources from last winter, NERC said the leading contribution came from short-term storage batteries, with 11 GW in new capacity added. Demand response resources — pledges by industrial companies and other power users to reduce demand in grid emergencies in return for compensation — increased by 8 GW.
But the amount of energy that grid operators expect from wind generation during peak storm hours was marked down by 14 GW. Most of the reduction came from Texas and the Midwest, where grid operators revised expectations of what wind power can do in the worst winter conditions, NERC’s Olson noted. Although significant solar power was added in the past year, only about 1 GW of that was counted as being available to meet peak demand in the worst wintertime hours.
“All this tells us that we have a tightening of reserves as demand escalates and resources aren’t quite keeping pace,” Olson said.
