After a mostly mild and wet start to winter, much of the nation was walloped by a monster winter storm just before Christmas. Our communities saw plunging temperatures, high winds, ice, and snow. Some members experienced power outages, and we know how miserable that is in extreme weather. Your cooperative’s employees did a great job restoring power in extremely difficult conditions, facing wind chills down to -33 degrees. Soaring demand across the region caused a dangerous situation that could have resulted in outages that were much more widespread, longer in duration, and completely out of the hands of South Central Power’s workers to restore.
Crisis Averted
As we approached this potential crisis point, which could have resulted in rolling blackouts or even larger outages, we joined other utilities in our region in asking members to voluntarily conserve power. Maybe you lowered your thermostat a few degrees, put off energy-intensive tasks like laundry, or found other ways to pitch in. Your efforts made a difference, as South Central Power and our neighbors avoided what could have been disastrous.
In case that sounds fantastical — consider that it was the reality for utility consumers in some parts of the U.S., like areas served by the Tennessee Valley Authority and investor-owned utilities like Duke Energy. Large, multistate power grid operators were unable to meet demand, and conservation efforts weren’t enough, so utilities were required to institute rolling blackouts. Without forced outages in these regions, the grid could have broken down in a series of catastrophic failures that might have taken days or weeks to fix.
How We Got Here
Just a few years ago, this kind of event would have been unthinkable — so how did we get here? Many corners of our nation, from Washington, D.C., to Wall Street and corporate board rooms in Silicon Valley, have spent decades telling us that new forms of power generation like solar and wind can easily replace baseload generation sources like the nuclear power and coal-fired plants that our nation’s grid was built to deliver. Meanwhile, scientists and researchers from respected organizations, such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Electric Power Research Institute, are warning that the wildly ambitious goals we’re seeing like “Net Zero by 2050” are slowly undermining our mission and the reason most utilities exist — which is to provide dependable, affordable power, even in extreme weather and high demand.
What’s Next
Efforts are underway to upgrade the nation’s transmission system to better operate using more intermittent sources of power like solar and wind. This is costly, and we see those higher costs reflected in your bills each month as the generation and transmission component continues to trend mostly upward. These rising costs in no way financially benefit South Central Power; instead they are collected by us only to be passed along to our generation and transmission providers. Even with these improvements, there is no realistic path using technology that exists today that will get us to a state of dependable and affordable power and attaining the goal of zero carbon emissions in the next 10, 20, or probably 30 years. Despite this reality, our industry is facing financial and regulatory pressures to close coal plants. A recent report from the Energy Information Administration projects that roughly one quarter of the nation’s remaining coal plants will be shuttered by 2029.
Unfortunately, this will only exacerbate the problem and increase the likelihood that grid operators are notifying utilities and the public of the risk of rolling blackouts in the future.
We’re Here for You
At South Central Power, we’ve long advocated for a balanced approach to power generation that is environmentally responsible while balancing the need for dependability and affordability.
Later this month, other leaders from electric cooperatives across the nation and I will be headed to Washington, D.C., to meet with our elected officials. Part of our message will be the need for a reasonable and balanced approach to transitioning to cleaner forms of generation that doesn’t compromise dependability or affordability. There are many ways we work to keep the lights on, and this is one of them. We appreciate the opportunity to serve you, and know that we’ll keep working on your behalf.
From the March 2023 issue of Ohio Cooperative Living.