Programming note: We’ll be off Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day but will be back in your inboxes Tuesday. Bitterly cold weather blanketing the Great Plains is moving east — testing an energy grid that almost collapsed into crisis during Winter Storm Elliott just over a year ago. The Christmas 2022 “bomb cyclone” of freezing temperatures and high-velocity winds seized natural gas utilities and gas-burning power generators along the Eastern Seaboard. Gas flows out of Appalachia plummeted. On Dec. 24, nearly 18 percent of power plant capacity in the eastern half of the country was out of service. New York City came within a day of seeing gas cut off for millions of homes and businesses. Elliott exposed a dangerous misalignment of the natural gas and electricity markets during an extreme weather emergency, Peter Behr reports. Communications broke down. Power generators failed despite assurances they could be fired up when energy was needed the most. And it shined a light on a persistent failure by Congress, regulators and top energy executives to address the issues — even as electric utilities increasingly rely on gas. “There isn’t a clear path forward,” said Jim Robb, chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees the bulk power grid along with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. New Yorkers and their utility got lucky that December. Consolidated Edison drew on stored natural gas. Temperatures tipped upward just enough to avoid a total collapse. As a result, the effect of Elliott’s deep freeze on the eastern grid that stretches from the Rockies to the Atlantic Ocean passed almost unnoticed for the general public. Elliott was the fifth winter storm in 11 years causing widespread power outages that jeopardized grid operations, including Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which was blamed for at least 240 deaths and billions of dollars in property losses in Texas. The major bone of contention is familiar: Who should be regulated? For more than a decade, natural gas executives have resisted talk of mandatory reliability rules for producers and pipelines that sell gas into the vast U.S. electricity markets. Power companies operate in an entirely different universe. After the 2003 Northeast blackout that shut off power to 50 million people in the U.S. and Canada, Congress passed mandatory electric grid reliability standards. To do the same for gas, Congress would have to act; and with every new meltdown on Capitol Hill, a serious fix seems a more distant possibility. Susan Tierney, senior adviser for the Analysis Group, noted the oil and gas-heavy makeup of energy committees in Congress. "It doesn’t surprise me," she said, “that it’s hard at times to gather broad bipartisan support for taking action that the gas industry doesn’t want.”
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