{"id":8429,"date":"2021-03-11T11:07:23","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T15:07:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/?p=8429"},"modified":"2025-02-06T14:58:16","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T19:58:16","slug":"utility-planning-lessons-from-texas-four-recommendations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/igs\/2021\/03\/11\/utility-planning-lessons-from-texas-four-recommendations\/","title":{"rendered":"Utility Planning Lessons from Texas: Four Recommendations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recommended new approaches to ensuring reliability and resilience in planning for high-impact common mode events.<\/em><\/p>\n

Guest post by Dr. Ira Shavel<\/a><\/p>\n

The events of February 15-19, 2021 in Texas and parts of the Midwest demonstrate the vulnerability of the power system to high-impact common mode events. The key feature that made the situation in Texas particularly disastrous was that cold weather and precipitation affected virtually all types of generation (gas, wind, coal, and nuclear). The weather affecting multiple generation facilities at the same time resulted in a major common mode event.<\/p>\n

The events of February 15-19 point out the criticality of electricity in today\u2019s society. In large parts of Texas, customers lost not only power, which for many also meant heating, but also lost water supply, and some experienced disastrous flooding from broken pipes. It is fair to say that the events of February 15-19 go well beyond what we usually think of as reliability. The failures exposed a lack of resilience in overall electric, natural gas, and water infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Common mode events like these are not in the scope of utility planning. For example, in its November 5, 2020, Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy<\/em>, ERCOT considered extreme load conditions but did not consider the failure of a large number of generating units due to a common cause.<\/p>\n

My colleagues Paul Centolella, Mark Gildersleeve, Alex Rudkevich, Richard Tabors, and I wrote a January 2021 report for the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Exploring the Impacts of Extreme Events, Natural Gas Fuel and Other Contingencies on Resource Adequacy<\/em><\/a>, in which we described the importance of planning for extreme weather (Chapter 4) and recommended strategies to enhance resilience (Chapter 6). The report also discusses cyber threats, which should not be discounted as a real possibility, especially in light of the recent SolarWinds hack<\/a> that we know affected critical infrastructure.<\/p>\n

We began our paper with the observation, \u201cIt is human nature to under-estimate the likelihood of extreme events. Across topics varying from weather to fuel supply and cybersecurity, today\u2019s power industry employs planning methods that tend to understate the probability of supply disruptions affecting multiple units and their impact on consumers and the system itself.\u201d The February 15 -19 events in Texas are not dissimilar to what occurred in February 2011 in Texas. Fortunately, at that time the results were not as disastrous, although 4,000 megawatts of customer load were shed<\/a>. It may have seemed at the time a rare event, but it has reoccurred this year with even greater intensity. The event of February 2011 was not the only recent warning that this type of event could happen again in Texas. The \u201cpolar vortex\u201d event of January 5-7, 2014 dipped into Texas but did not lead to outages. It should not have been a shock that extreme weather would occur again during Texas winters.<\/p>\n

The polar vortex<\/a> is a wind pattern that circles the North Pole and keeps extremely cold air confined near the pole. When those winds become unstable, the polar vortex can dip south bringing Arctic air with it. Some scientists believe that global warming is resulting in a less stable polar vortex, but this has not been proven.<\/p>\n

The electric grid is moving into a new era in which a greater fraction of generating assets are wind and solar, and an increasing portion of the generation occurs behind the meter and is not visible to the grid operator. At the same time, the economy has become increasingly dependent on a highly reliable supply of electricity. With many people now working from home, a pattern that will probably continue in the future, highly reliable electricity to all consumers, not just the business centers of major cities, has become very important. The industry needs to plan to make electric service highly resilient to significant supply disruptions.<\/p>\n

Report Findings<\/h4>\n

In our report, we observe that:<\/p>\n