WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy held a press conference to highlight fossil fuels’ role in maintaining reliability over the recent winter storm and boast of some of the actions the agency took to bolster the grid.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported the highest ever withdrawal of natural gas from storage the week that Winter Storm Fern affected the eastern half of the country, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said at the Feb. 6 event.
“That’s a symbol of what increased energy demand came with this storm,” he added. “What is natural gas? It’s the largest source of home heating for Americans in the country. It’s the largest source of electricity generation in the United States.”
Fern was larger than Winter Storm Uri, which five years ago led to one of the biggest crises in the power industry’s history when much of Texas was without power for days and hundreds of people died. Fern’s effects on the energy system were much less, Wright said.
While Uri knocked out power to 4.5 million homes largely due to failures in generation and intertwined issues on the natural gas system, just over a million homes lost power this year and that was due primarily to ice-laden tree limbs taking out power lines.
“We wish that was zero,” Wright said. “We work and strategize and talk every day about how to reduce that number.”
Standing next to bar charts that highlighted how little renewable power contributed to the high demand set by the storm and related cold, Wright argued that the industry needed to focus on installing dispatchable capacity.
“If you want to add to the capacity of our electricity grid, enable data centers, enable us to reshore manufacturing — the only way you do that that’s helpful is you have to add to our peak generating dispatch ability,” he said.
Wind was down 40% during the peak demand seen during the storm, compared to a more normal weather day last year. Overall, that was true, but intermittency correlates with randomness and SPP reported that it had more wind than expected, enabling it to ship power east — in a reversal of what happened during Uri when imports from PJM and other points east minimized its own outages. (See Wind Output Enabled SPP Exports to Neighbors During Storm.)
Solar works better in regions with more sunshine like the deserts in the West, but even then, Wright said, the sun did not always shine, especially when overall energy demand was peaking.
“Peak demand for energy is always in the winter, by far,” Wright said. “Peak demand for electricity is sometimes and often in the summer. Because the biggest use of energy in people’s households by far is heating, like that winter storm we just went through.”
The natural gas distribution network was delivering four times more energy than the grid was at its maximum stress during the recent storm, he added.
But the natural gas system meeting peak household demand when electricity generators also need more power is a dilemma the industry continues to face. (See Grid Weathers Latest Winter Storm, but Still Faces Gas Coordination Problems.)
The RTOs in the northeast still are working to procure as much fuel as possible as the cold continues to affect demand, Wright said. As is typical, ISO-NE had to rely on burning oil to make it through, as that fuel produced 35% of power at the height of the storm.
“Where it matters at peak demand time, oil was No. 1,” Wright said. “This is crazy. Oil was a huge source of electricity generation in the United States when my mom was in high school.”
DOE is working to improve gas-electric coordination, as it has over the past 15 to 20 years, said Assistant Secretary of Energy James Danly. DOE’s National Petroleum Council (NPC) recently released a report making recommendations. (See DOE’s National Petroleum Council Releases Report on Gas-electric Coordination.)
“The RTOs in the Northeast did their best to procure as much fuel as possible in advance and help their gas generators do that in advance of the weather,” Danly said. “It’s still ongoing. The temperatures are still cold, but we’re seeing, especially in PJM, efforts to get gas out as far as possible, and that’s in part with the encouragement of the department and talking with the stakeholders.”
NPC recommended making it easier to build more pipelines. A major focus of the Trump administration has been to get the Continental Pipeline built, which needs regulatory approval from the state of New York. The project would bring up to 650,000 Dth per day of Marcellus shale gas to New England and New York. The project won approval from FERC in 2014, but it was blocked by the state of New York.
Constitution has asked FERC to reauthorize the project. But unlike the vast majority of pipeline proposals, Constitution did not list any anchor customers, which the commissioners view as an indication of need in pipeline approvals. Wright argued the fact that the petition does not have any doesn’t mean it’s not needed.
“If a pipeline has been blocked, you know, by the governor of New York, and she says she’s going to continue to block the pipeline, people wait for that politics to come out,” Wright said. “We will have customers coming out of the woodwork. Do you want to burn far cheaper natural gas versus oil?”
While New England’s generation fleet and power consumers would benefit from more natural gas, the vastly different business models make it so generators do not have the incentives to invest in the firm gas contracts pipelines need to secure financing, recently retired ISO-NE CEO Gordon van Welie said during a recent webinar.
“I’ve also spent a lot of many hours talking to the merchant generators,” van Welie said. “And you know, I’ve come to understand it does not make economic sense for merchant generators to invest in long-term contracts that would be required to ensure adequate pipeline and gas storage infrastructure for these intermittent peaky events, which are low probability. So, they would rather price the risk of non-performance of the gas system into their offers, or financially hedge their risk, or physically try and hedge their risk with dual fueling — if they can get the siting and the permits for dual fueling.”
The New England states came to FERC during the Obama administration asking to socialize the cost of new pipelines among electricity consumers, but the commission found the idea clashed with the Federal Power Act, and pipelines ran into issues with state politics as well.
“The work-around that was conceived in New England, but never put into effect, was to require the electric distribution companies essentially putting electric ratepayers on the hook for contracting for firm transportation from the pipelines, and then having the EDCs resell that capacity to merchant generators,” van Welie said.