Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, D.C., Philadelphia under temporary power grid emergency
by Brad Matthews · The Washington TimesThe Department of Energy has ordered the power grid operator covering all or part of 13 states and the District of Columbia to get equipment and backup power generation ready to prevent blackouts.
Federal energy officials said Monday that they ordered regional transmission organization PJM Interconnection LLC to marshal the extra resources “as needed to maintain reliability” in light of heightened demand, planned transmission outages and planned outages for generator maintenance.
The order, issued Monday, went into effect Tuesday and will last through Friday.
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The grid that PJM Interconnection operates covers Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. It also covers all of Virginia except for its southwestern tip, and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina and Tennessee, including most of the Chicago metropolitan area.
PJM Interconnection asked the federal government to implement the order. In an alert Monday, the power grid operator said that the order temporarily waives environmental permit restrictions when it comes to generating power.
The order also allows PJM Interconnection to tell customers that use the most energy, such as data centers, to switch over to backup power generation sources as needed, the organization said.
In the alert, the power grid operator explained that the grid was being strained by “unusually warm fall weather and planned equipment outages required for maintenance and construction.”
The operator said that it has outright cancelled or recalled as many outages as feasible, with the outages that are still proceeding costing the system over 62,000 megawatts of power.
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Normally, the period from mid-September through early December is used by both power transmission and generation facilities to do necessary maintenance so that the system can be used to its fullest extent during winter, PJM Interconnection said.
A PJM Interconnection spokesperson said in a statement to WUSA-TV that “the conditions we have seen in both September and October reflect the reality that PJM and other grid operators are facing: increased baseload electricity demand is growing faster than new capacity can come onto the system, and unpredictable weather patterns are providing fewer days to perform important maintenance or construction on the generation and transmission equipment serving our footprint.”
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Brad Matthews
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