Grid Resiliency

Grid resiliency is increasingly a topic of discussion, largely because of very public large scale power disruptions that seem to be becoming more common. This recent article in the Wall Street Journal is an example. While the increasing amount of intermittent wind and solar generation are contributors to this decreased resiliency, given their still relatively low percentage of generation this is not the full story. The decline of coal and the accompanying rise in natural gas is the biggest change in electricity generation over the last decade. This has been accompanied by an increasingly deregulated industry where responsibility for resiliency is not clearly delineated. 

It turns out that natural gas is dependent on its own distribution network of storage and gas pipelines which have different attributes from the coal distribution and storage network it has replaced. As was demonstrated in Texas in 2021, the gas network needs to be designed to handle freezing temperatures and is dependent on the electricity network to power parts of its infrastructure. The lesson is that big changes in the grid take time to stabilize and the current de centralized deregulated approach only reacts to structural problems after they are apparent, and does not anticipate. 

This should be a lesson for what is to become as wind and solar grow and coal and nuclear continue to decline. This will be a far more consequential change with far bigger problems to solve. It is easy to anticipate that the grid will become far less resilient very quickly. There will be an inevitable backlash when reality sinks in.

By Edmund Kelly

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-power-grid-is-increasingly-unreliable-11645196772

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