The punch of bitter cold, snow and icy rain that blanketed the eastern half of the country starting Sunday cut off power to nearly 1 million electricity customers concentrated across the South, from Texas to Tennessee.
Outages of local power lines hit by ice and downed trees followed the storm’s path through Appalachia, leaving Tennessee hardest hit with 336,600 customers out of power at midday Sunday, according to PowerOutage.com. Outages were concentrated in the suburbs of Nashville.
North of the ice band, an expanse of snow fell from New Mexico to the central Great Lakes, with up to 12 inches in some places. Road travel was dangerous or impossible. In the Northeast, sleet piled up from Maryland to Massachusetts.
As the storm moves off the East Coast and into the Atlantic Ocean on Monday, Arctic air will rush in behind it and keep extremely cold temperatures in place for days across two-thirds of the country, according to the National Weather Service.
More than 50,000 power line workers from at least 37 states were repositioned to respond to the storm, according to the Edison Electric Institute, but timetables for restoration were guesswork.
Natural gas supplies could be tested Monday. Temperatures are expected to fall below zero over the Appalachian gas fields that help supply heat and power across the East. Gas generation accounts for more than 40 percent of the eastern United States’ electric power.
“Incoming deadly wind chills will leave cold air damming over much of the eastern half of the U.S. throughout the coming week,” said Sunny Wescott, chief meteorologist of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in an email.
“This is not a short duration cold on the backside of this storm; it is multiple pulses of Arctic air and will make black ice far more prevalent even days after the storm has left,” Wescott added.
Columbus, Ohio, gateway to the Marcellus and Utica shale gas fields serving eastern Great Lakes and mid-Atlantic states, saw temperatures drop to 19 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. On Monday, the forecast projects a bitter minus 2 F with winds as high as 15 mph.
The Department of Energy on Sunday invoked emergency authority to permit fossil fuel power plants in the 13-state PJM Interconnection — the largest U.S. power market that extends from the mid-Atlantic region to Chicago — to operate in excess of air quality permits if needed through the end of the month. “The order will help PJM with the extreme temperatures and storm destruction across the Mid-Atlantic and reduce costs for Americans during the winter storm,” DOE said.
However, spot wholesale electricity prices shot up Sunday, with parts of Maryland and Virginia on PJM’s eastern edge paying over $1,000 per megawatt hour around 9 a.m. EST. The average location-based hourly price in PJM in the first nine months of last year was just over $50.
The regional grid operator in the central part of the country, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), declared an emergency Saturday. Utility companies such as St. Louis-based Ameren and Minneapolis-based Xcel asked customers to conserve energy.
In the South, Entergy’s customers in northern Louisiana and in parts of Mississippi were experiencing outages Sunday. Nashville Electric Service, which purchases power from the Tennessee Valley Authority, had more than 200,000 outages Sunday — about half of its customers in and around the city.
The grid operator cited forced outages, cold temperatures and limited ability to transfer power from its northern and southern regions as reasons for declaring an emergency. MISO’s U.S. electricity market stretches from the northern tip of Minnesota to the southern tip of Louisiana.
The financial consequences of electricity constraints and outages extend beyond energy costs, experts noted.
The loss of power amid freezing weather over multiple days creates severe hazards of broken water pipes and overloaded household electrical circuit when customers plug in portable space heaters, said Bob Marshall, CEO of Whisker Labs in Germantown, Maryland.
His company has equipped 1.2 million customers with devices that track power interruptions.
“This is a huge stress on a home,” Marshall said.
Extreme winter storms have caused significant damage this decade.
When Winter Storm Elliott struck on Christmas week in 2022, the shocks of extreme cold and high winds froze power plants and knocked out one-third of Appalachian gas production. That triggered emergency operations across PJM. Had the storm not kept moving, 1.1 million New York City customers of Con Edison could have lost gas service, with restoration dragging on for weeks or months, federal regulators warned.
Elliott’s impact accelerated mandatory cold weather regulation for power plants. The natural gas industry committed to take voluntary measures to winterize their equipment. The gas industry has resisted more stringent regulation.
The gas and grid operators “have made many improvements on the winter readiness front since four years ago, but it’s only been tested once or twice. This will be a test,” said George Katsigiannakis, a power markets expert at the consultancy ICF International.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, grid operator for most of the state, said outages were concentrated in eastern Texas, and the system overall remained balanced.
State regulators and ERCOT operators enforced requirements to winterize equipment after Winter Storm Uri in 2021. Forced power cutoffs affected 4.4 million customers as operators strained to keep the grid from crashing that year. More than 200 deaths were attributed to the storm.
