Energy groups call on Duke Energy to respond to blackouts by improving transmission

Nearly half a million Duke Energy customers experienced rolling blackouts on Dec. 24, 2022, during a very cold winter storm. This screenshot from Poweroutage.us shows that North Carolina’s northeastern corner did not have the same outages experienced by much of the state.

Joining a multi-state electricity transmission organization could help Duke Energy and other Southeastern utilities reduce the effects of events like last month’s winter storm that left half a million North Carolinians in the dark, renewable energy advocates argued Thursday.

On Christmas Eve morning, Duke Energy used rolling blackouts to preserve its power grid for the first time in the company’s history. The blackouts affected about half a million customers statewide.

“There’s no individual utility territory that can grapple with that type of reliability event effectively. It takes something with a bigger footprint, with a bigger map in the control room. The weather is changing, and if we keep doing the same thing we’ve done before, we won’t dodge the bullet next time,” said Eddy Moore, the Coastal Conservation League’s energy senior program director.

To help prevent future blackouts and damage to the grid from extreme weather, a group of renewable energy trade and environmental organizations recommended that Duke Energy and North Carolina explore further connections with regional grid operations while also diversifying energy sources.

The Southeast is dominated by utilities that try to maintain their own electric grids, where the Midwest and Northeast feature grid operators that send power across service areas, said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association.

“If a utility in the Southeast runs into trouble — if they have a power plant that comes offline for whatever reason or if they can’t get fuel — it makes it more difficult for our utilities in the South to get enough power to run. And so they have to import power from their neighbors or sometimes, as we saw with Winter Storm Elliott, those utilities have to go into these extreme measures of turning off power to their customers,” Mahan said.

December’s blackouts were caused by rapidly escalating demand linked with a large system of frigid temperatures. As customers across the state turned up their thermostats, the cold weather caused two coal plants in Person County and a natural gas plant in Rockingham County to lose some generation capacity by freezing equipment, Duke officials told the N.C. Utilities Commission.

Duke officials noted that while some of their fossil fuel-powered plants lost capacity, the company’s solar plants performed “as expected” even though they were not able to generate energy in the pre-dawn hours when the energy crisis started.

Jeff Brooks, a Duke Energy spokesman, wrote in an email that while demand on the 24th exceeded the utility’s forecast, Duke was confident that it could provide enough electricity as late as the evening of Dec. 23. Then demand continued to increase, the power plant components froze, some independent power providers were unable to deliver what Duke needed and some out-of-state interconnections were unavailable due to increased demand elsewhere.

“It was more of a case of additional generating capacity not being available to be delivered,” Brooks wrote.

Still, a map of outages from Christmas Eve showed that the lights largely stayed on in North Carolina’s northeastern corner, even as Western North Carolina, the Piedmont and the Triangle were all enduring blackouts.

That corner of the state is part of a larger system served by PJM, a transmission organization that helps electricity move across a 13-state area that spans Illinois to Pennsylvania with North Carolina in its southeastern corner. Utilities that are part of PJM are able to sell their power on a wholesale market.

Duke has historically resisted calls to join a regional transmission organization like PJM, saying it could slow the state’s transition to renewable energy. Such a move may also have the effect of weakening the utility’s monopoly in much of North Carolina.

“We work every day to improve our electric service and deliver the reliability our customers expect. A (regional transmission organization) would present more risks than benefits to our customers and our state,” Brooks wrote.

During parts of the Christmas storm, Duke was able to import about a gigawatt of power from PJM. That was not enough to avert the rolling blackouts.

“Since they weren’t in PJM, they weren’t in the market, they weren’t prioritized. PJM did not have blackouts, so it had the power but it had to give its members the first shot at that power,” said Chris Carmody, executive director of the Carolinas Clean Energy Business Association, a renewable energy trade group.

Carmody and others also argued that the winter storm demonstrated that natural gas-fired power plants don’t provide the reliability often touted by Duke Energy. Mahan noted that at times of high demand, drawing on natural gas can actually cause the natural gas system to lose pressure.

“Natural gas is reliable a lot of the time, but it’s not infallible at all,” Carmody said.

The Utilities Commission recently authorized Duke Energy to plan for new natural gas plants as part of its plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That provision has drawn criticism from environmental groups that argue that methane emissions from gas-fired plants significantly contribute to warming the atmosphere.

The commission also ordered Duke to procure 1,600 megawatts of energy storage — with 600 paired with solar panels. Storage, Carmody argued, offers a cheaper path to making the electric grid reliable than building new gas plants.

“They want to build the most expensive stuff because the least expensive options don’t generate as much profit,” Carmody said.

With much of the storm’s impact coming on Christmas Eve, analysts and watchdogs have figured that most of the demand spike came from people trying to keep their homes warm, not industry or commercial operations drawing on the grid.

Maggie Shober, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy’s director of utility reform, said those circumstances show that it is important to ramp up energy efficiency efforts. In its Carbon Plan, the Utilities Commission approved Duke’s planning for a 1% reduction in total electricity demand via efficiency efforts like smart thermostats or home insulation, with what commissioners called an “aspirational 1.5% target.”

“Energy efficiency programs,” Shober said, “are definitely part of a resilient solution to not having to do this in the future with this kind of weather.”

This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.

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