This blog post first appeared in Utility Dive on May 3, 2024.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff recently revealed that winter storms Gerri and Heather brought a grid operator to the brink of rolling blackouts sometime between January 10 and January 17, 2024. But instead of providing a detailed assessment of what went wrong, they primarily highlighted the absence of rolling blackouts and the incremental improvements that have been made since the dangerous grid failures of storms Elliott in 2022 and Uri in 2021.
Gerri and Heather were two separate but overlapping storm systems. This blog post refers to them as one storm event to avoid confusion with past events.
Shortly before this latest storm broke out, UCS published a report finding fossil gas power plants to be disproportionately susceptible to failure during extreme winter storms in recent years….
Read the full article originally published at blog.ucsusa.org.