Winter reliability now rides on interregional transfers

Peak unplanned outages across the Eastern Interconnection reached about 49,700 MW in January, down from 90,500 MW during Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, while ERCOT's peaked near 19,420 MW against about 35,300 MW during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021. FERC and NERC, in a report released Thursday, credit the improvement to cold-weather preparation by plant owners and grid operators and to electricity moving between regions that rarely have had to move it; neither footprint ordered planned outages in January, even with gas demand near record levels and U.S. electric use peaking at 666 GW.

Uri remains the benchmark for the industry. During that storm, equipment could not operate, gas deliveries to generators were constrained by the freeze, and the Texas Department of State Health Services estimated 246 deaths, most from extreme cold and hypothermia. The distance between 35,300 MW and 19,420 MW is the distance between that winter and this one.

MISO's imports peaked at about 9 GW, mostly from PJM but also from Canada and neighboring systems, and Robert Clark, an engineer in FERC's Office of Electric Reliability, told the agency's open meeting that every winter shows interregional transfers are critical to reliability. Florida made the two-way case concrete by exporting power during Winter Storm Fern in late January and importing during Winter Storm Gianna, from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2, which Clark described as neighbors taking turns helping each other.

Commissioner Lindsay See summed up the presentation by saying that meeting historic demand without manual load shed shows progress in cold-weather preparation, fuel readiness and coordination. The megawatts that carried the margin came from across seams. During Fern and Gianna the Department of Energy issued 15 emergency orders under the Federal Power Act, described in the presentation as first-ever, which suggests that in the worst weeks the seams are held together administratively as much as economically.

Grid access has become the asset class, and the transition premium has moved off merchant renewables toward dispatchable generation and the grid itself. January is the evidence: 9 GW of MISO imports is capacity that exists only to the extent a transfer limit allows it, which makes a rating, a wire and a coordination protocol the binding constraint on reliability rather than a turbine. The policy weather matters as much as the physical kind. DOE has cancelled three transmission corridors, which raises the political risk premium for interregional sponsors, and roughly a dozen Eastern Interconnection projects that could cut retail rates and strengthen reliability are sitting behind approvals.

The next cold snap gets measured against those figures. Whether the transfer capacity that carried January gets expanded on purpose is now a capital question, and the projects that would answer it are the ones sitting behind approvals.