“Rolling Blackouts”
By Scott Hamilton
Recent reports released by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has revealed some bad news to residents of the United States and Canada in 2024. The report by this international committee indicates that over 300 million people could be affected by power outages in the coming years, as our demand for energy increases and reliability of our infrastructure weakens. They weigh in on several factors to make the alarming forecast.
The main factor cited in their report is the increased demand fueled by the technology industry and widespread electrification of buildings and vehicles. I have written in the past about the lack of planning to support the required power demand for electric vehicles as being a major factor in the adoption of the technology. The modern electric car uses nearly the same amount of power to travel 300 miles as the standard American home uses in a 24-hour period. The average home owns two vehicles and if we shift to all electric we will nearly triple the demand on the electric grid, which is already under stress.
The second factor is the surge in attacks on the supporting infrastructure; in 2022 the United States experienced a 77 percent increase in attacks primarily on the electrical grid, and this was not even counting the digital attacks, as the study was focused on physical attacks against the grid. These physical attacks ranged from vandalism of power substations to the intentional downing of power lines and power poles.
NERC’s report claims that there is an urgency for making substantial investment in our power infrastructure, from increasing the number of power transformers in operation to increasing the security of remote systems on the grid. In Missouri we are currently generating less power than we use, so we are importing power from facilities in neighboring states on a regular basis. We generate 66 percent of the power in the state via coal fired power plants, 9 percent from nuclear, 2 percent from hydro-power and the remainder comes from wind, solar, petroleum and biomass. Forty percent of the state’s population depends on electricity as their primary heating source and nearly 100 percent utilize electricity for air conditioning in the summer months.
Currently Missouri lands near the middle in grid reliability with an average of 1.14 major power outages per year, lasting an average of two hours and 45 minutes per outage. This is well below the national average of 1.62 outages per year, lasting an average of six hours. This data is based on reported outages over the last five years and obviously only large outages are reported so you may have experienced many more outages on average than seen by the state-wide data. The good news is that we live in one of the states with the lowest likelihood of an outage and seems to be among the fastest to solve the issues. The bad news is that the national trends indicate that we will see more outages and longer recovery times.
The third factor playing into the predicted increase in blackouts is the age of our infrastructure. A majority of the electric grid’s primary components are more than 40-years-old in the state of Missouri. A majority of our transmission and generation equipment is more than 45-years-old and the power poles and lines are on average 40-years-old. It is estimated that updating the grid will require a $177 billion investment to revitalize our infrastructure. The really sad part is despite the aging infrastructure and being among the lowest power rates in the nation, we still saw among the largest increase in cost for electricity. Between 2007 and 2016 the state rates for electricity were raised by 46.7 percent while the national average increase was only 11.2 percent, and it leads me to wonder where the increased investment is going.
As I have said before and will continue to say, we are in dire need of improvements in our infrastructure, not just in Missouri, but nationwide. We would be far better served by forcing our electricity providers to make the necessary improvements than to invest in the new “green” energy initiatives. We all saw the reports of the green energy failures in Texas during the blizzards last winter, leaving the state crippled by frozen wind turbines and snow covered solar panels. The same funds used to build the failing “green” energy plants could have been applied to updating the existing infrastructure and providing more stability to the grid. Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to sh*******@te**********.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
