A new North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) review of power outages and gas industry failures reveals the potential for prolonged and deadly power outages. But their simple, yet potentially life-saving recommendations are voluntary, and the responsible parties go unnamed.
NERC—as well as the regional organizations across the country tasked with ensuring the electric grid remains reliable and secure—identify gas supply failures as not just a cause of deadly 2021 power outages in Texas, but also as an ongoing threat to the restarting the electric system following a blackout during an extreme cold weather event, which is called a “blackstart.”
Their findings related to blackstarts have not been widely reported because NERC and FERC released their report in late December, obscured the identities of…
Read the full article originally published at blog.ucsusa.org.