When extreme cold like Winter Storm Fern sweeps in, utilities have to prepare and respond quickly.
On Monday morning, 500 workers were out restoring power to Henderson County residents. By midweek, across southern Appalachia, most outages were repaired. But, according to Duke Energy spokesperson Jeff Brooks, the weekend’s ice was less than half the battle. The cold is actually harder on the grid, particularly when it lingers below freezing.
“If it's one day that's cold, typically it doesn't impact your bill all that much,” Brooks said.
But four or five days?
“Even though it's winter, this is still unseasonable, to see this much low temperatures for an extended period. That will have an impact on your bill because you're going to use more electricity to heat your home,” he said.
To meet the energy demand of extreme cold, utilities rely on a diverse energy mix. And that can mean fossil fuel usage ramps up in order to keep pace with the millions of homes that need extra warmth.
“We try to hedge as much as we can, meaning we will buy natural gas supply when [the price is] low and use that as much as possible,” said Scott Brooks, a TVA spokesperson. “And then depending on, again, what's happening with the market, we may run coal units more often and some natural gas.” Coal and nuclear plants take about a week to fire up in advance of a cold snap.
According to Brooks, nuclear is the most efficient for the utility to run, followed by methane gas.
Extreme cold — often, paradoxically, fueled by climate change — presents a massive challenge for utilities dealing with both aging infrastructure and increasing demand overall.
Experts on renewable energy and energy efficiency as well as advocates say that getting off fossil fuels may actually be cheaper and more efficient in the long run during cold snaps as long as energy can be stored in batteries, rather than relying on a sunny or windy day. However, regional utilities haven’t yet invested in the battery storage they need in order to rely on renewables to that extent.
Michelle Moore is the CEO of an affordable-energy nonprofit called Groundswell. She also formerly served on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s federally-appointed Board of Directors. She told BPR that after Winter Storm Elliot caused outages in 2022, TVA upgraded infrastructure and added 2,000 megawatt-hours of power, but that was all gas power. She hopes to see the utility add battery storage for solar in order to back up energy resources, as well as invest in energy efficiency to help people use less energy overall.
“Viewing our homes as part of our energy infrastructure is critical because all the energy that you don't waste from inefficiency is energy you can use when you need it,” Moore said.
Energy demand hits people at home in a very real way. Consumers will often see extreme cold impact their power bills, said Maggie Shober, an energy analyst at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, in part because cold drives up gas and electricity prices.
The national demand driven by Winter Storm Fern, as well as the freezing of infrastructure like pipelines, is pushing gas prices to their highest in three years. It’s caused volatility in an already-changeable market. “In the winter, when gas prices are really expensive already and everybody across the Eastern Interconnect was trying to get power and you know most of them use a whole bunch of gas.”
Gas isn’t as affordable an option as it might seem, Shober argues., utilities could avoid this type of price volatility by investing in battery storage to save energy generated by wind and solar for a cloudy few days.
“A lot of [the utilities] are increasing their use of gas. And so fuel costs are passed on directly to the customers in a separate rider and so customers will be paying for that as well, on their bills,” she said.Having solar and wind, battery storage, and access to neighboring utilities helps plan the grid, she said, because “you always want to have a grid that's bigger than the storm.”
Duke and TVA representatives both said the region hasn’t yet seen its coldest day in the cold snap yet. So, demand is likely to increase as temperatures across the region remain in the teens and single digits through the weekend.
