Gas-Driven Power Grid Outages Raise Concerns About Reliability

Gas plant outages have accounted for the most reliability failures in the previous five winter storms dating back to 2011, figures that should apply fresh pressure to US energy regulators to scrutinize fuel deliveries to gas-fired power plants, an advocacy group found in a report released Tuesday.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should order grid operators to consider the risks of widespread failures in the gas-fired power plant fleet during extreme weather when evaluating the reliability of these resources, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said. New gas plants should be constructed only if absolutely needed for grid reliability, which should be an “extremely limited” case, the report said.

The group, echoing other advocacy groups and Biden administration energy officials, argues reliability would instead be bolstered by lowering barriers for building more renewable power and energy storage and installing transmission lines to connect it all. Utilities should also work with customers to widen the scope of energy efficiency that can reduce the need for power at peak times, it recommended.

Utilities and regional transmission organizations “have just been making really basic assumptions about the reliability that gas plants provide,” said Mark Specht, senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, ahead of the report’s release. “They’re not paying attention and incorporating the possibility of really widespread coordinated gas plant outages that happen in extreme winter weather.”

Freezing temperatures can cause equipment failures at the plants and cause supply disruptions of the fuel from the production wellheads and along the pipeline, the report noted.

Gas Power Grows

The report is part of a broader intensifying push to get regulators and grid reliability officials to scrutinize gas supplies and pipelines as a matter of electric grid reliability as well as a way to crack down on greenhouse gas emissions. About 40% of US electricity comes from burning natural gas, a figure that has risen over the last decade amid an American drilling boom and the closure of coal-fired power plants.

But as gas has emerged as the country’s leading source of power, its position outside the regulatory scope of the electric grid has highlighted operational and cultural clashes between two energy systems that use distinct marketing cycles and deliver fundamentally different products.

FERC Chairman Willie Phillips, a Democrat, has repeatedly said he wants to see a new regulatory body oversee gas reliability, but there doesn’t appear to be any imminent action in Congress.

The electric sector has long been subject to mandatory standards under the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), an electric reliability organization that reports to FERC, and “I think that we need to have a NERC for the gas side,” Phillips told Bloomberg last year. “There is no one entity that sits at the nexus of the gas and electric industry that is responsible for reliability.”

Gas trade organizations have acknowledged reliability during winter storms must improve. But they have defended gas as an essential fuel that will keep the power grid reliable during a period that coal plants shut down and more wind and solar energy are being built. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, though drilling impacts and methane leaks from pipelines has made it a target for environmental groups seeking to shut down fossil fuels instead of building new gas infrastructure.

Regulators Weighing Fixes

Under Phillips, FERC has rejected environmental groups’ arguments to consider a wider array of emissions and continued to approve natural gas pipeline projects that the commission has found provide needed supply to customers.

FERC and NERC are now reviewing a report published last year that included 20 recommendations and feedback from both the electric and gas sectors. While gas companies largely agreed with the electric sector on some of the report’s 20 recommendations, they split on suggestions to share more information with grid operators and require more weatherization actions from gas suppliers in order for them to declare force majeure, according to the report.

Gas pipelines have a “strong record of reliably delivering to our customers even under the extreme weather seen during recent winter storms,” the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, a Washington trade association, said last year in response to the report.

In November, INGAA, the Electric Power Supply Association, and the Natural Gas Supply Association formed a group called the Reliability Alliance and provided 11 recommendations to FERC to improve gas-electric coordination.

Damaging Storms

Though much of the country has experienced a mild winter so far this season, climate change is contributing to more extreme weather events.

The five winter storms assessed by Tuesday’s report include: 2011 Southwest Storm, 2014 polar vortex, 2018 South Central Storm, 2021 Winter Storm Uri, and 2022 Winter Storm Elliott.

Winter Storm Uri caused outages in Texas and neighboring states in February 2021 and contributed to more than 200 deaths and as much as $130 billion in economic damages. Gas accounted for about half of the unavailable capacity, according to the report. Wind accounted for roughly a quarter of unavailable capacity, it found.

If modeling adjusts to more accurately reflect gas’ performance, new renewables would have more of a level playing field as new capacity and the power system is planned by utilities and grid operators, UCS’s Specht said.

“Some combination of renewables might actually look a lot better than gas plants if you’re doing the analytics to figure out the reliability benefits that you’ll actually get from those gas plants,” he said.