As wintry conditions and frigid temperatures gripped much of the United States this weekend, the nation’s power system has avoided buckling like it has in past years. But the system continued to face severe strain early Monday.
Hundreds of thousands of residents and businesses largely in the southern parts of the country had no electricity. Most of those outages resulted from the typical challenges that accompany winter storms: snow piling up on electrical equipment and ice dangling from branches and power lines, causing them to snap. And with temperatures below freezing and demand for electricity expected to stay high, outages could very likely expand.
The storm this weekend blanketed wide parts of the nation under more than a foot of snow in some places and sheets of ice in others. Some weather models are predicting another storm, but meteorologists have cautioned that the forecast was hypothetical and should not be treated as a certainty.
“This next wave of ice that may be coming in is going to test the system even further,” said Calvin Butler, the chief executive of Exelon, which owns regulated utilities in New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Illinois. “All that ice, they’re just not used to it,” he said, referring to the Southeast. “We’re more used to hurricanes in the Southeast.”
The explosive winter storm that moved from the Southwest to the Northeast comes as electric grids struggle to manage a staggering rise in electricity demand from data centers, some of which support the development of artificial intelligence.
This is the first major test of the power system’s resilience during a potent winter storm in the era of huge data center expansion. In an unusual move, the Department of Energy late Sunday ordered the manager of Texas’ main electric grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to direct data centers and other facilities that consume a lot of energy to begin using backup generators in an effort to prevent blackouts.
Like other grid operators, ERCOT issued weather alerts ahead of the storm but expected conditions on the system to remain normal.
Texas experienced a widespread electric grid failure during a severe winter storm in February 2021 that killed more than 200 people. Energy companies in the state have since added more batteries, power plants and other resources, but industry experts said the state still had work to do.
“This is the fourth once-in-a-hundred-year winter storm in ERCOT in 25 years,” said Robert McCullough, of McCullough Research, a consulting firm in Portland, Ore. “We are forecasting poorly and preparing even worse.”
The Edison Electric Institute, a utility industry organization, is coordinating responses to the winter storm with executives of power companies across the country. That has helped utilities deploy 65,000 lineman and other workers to respond to power outages.
“People and trucks are rolling across the country, even throughout this weather to help people,” Mr. Butler of Exelon said.
Ivan Penn is a reporter based in Los Angeles and covers the energy industry. His work has included reporting on clean energy, failures in the electric grid and the economics of utility services.
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