67 Million Americans Got A Coded Warning About The Power Grid

Nobody Paid Any Attention To The Sept. 1 “Grid Operator” Emergency Order… Here’s A Behind-the-Scenes Look At How We Snuck By One More Time 

Most folks never noticed what happened this week. They flipped on the kitchen light and it came on. The refrigerator hummed along, the well pump kicked in, air conditioners groaned against the heat and millions of Americans went about their day.

But behind that ordinary wall switch, something considerably less ordinary was happening. The U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order on September 1 giving America’s largest electric-grid operator additional authority to keep enough electricity flowing through the system.

The operator is called PJM Interconnection, and unless you work in the electric business, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it. You probably ought to know the name.

PJM coordinates the movement of electricity across all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, serving roughly 67 million people.

And this week, the people responsible for keeping that enormous machine running were preparing for trouble.

The lights stayed on. That’s not the important part of the story.

The important part is what had to happen behind the scenes to keep them on.

When Washington Starts Reaching For The Emergency Switch

On September 1, the Department of Energy issued an emergency order under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act involving PJM. The order allowed specified generating resources to operate as needed to help maintain reliability during a period of unusually high electricity demand.

The Department of Energy’s emergency order also authorized PJM, working with transmission owners and utilities, to call upon backup generation resources as a last resort before reaching the most serious level of grid emergency. The order was scheduled to remain in effect through September 8.

That’s bureaucratic language for something pretty simple.

The government wanted additional electricity available if the grid got into trouble.

And PJM wasn’t the only system feeling pressure. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator — better known as MISO — was also preparing for unusually heavy electricity demand across its enormous territory.

MISO manages the flow of electricity across 15 U.S. states and Manitoba, Canada, covering a massive portion of America’s heartland. During extreme heat, millions of air conditioners running at once can push electricity demand sharply higher.

That doesn’t mean America’s electric grid was seconds away from collapsing.

But it does mean something worth remembering.

There isn’t an infinite amount of electricity waiting behind your wall outlet.

We Treat Electricity Like Water From A Bottomless Well

Modern Americans have become remarkably casual about electricity. We push a button and expect something to happen — every single time.

The freezer stays cold. The furnace blower runs. The sump pump empties the basement. The milking equipment works, livestock waterers keep flowing and the lights come on when somebody walks into the barn before sunrise.

Out here in the rural Midweast, electricity can be even more important because one failure can trigger another. If you’re on a private well, for example, no electricity may mean no water.

And no water means considerably more than missing your morning shower. It can mean no drinking water from the tap, no flushing toilets, no easy water for livestock and no convenient way to keep a thirsty garden alive during brutal summer heat.

A prolonged outage can also turn a freezer full of beef, venison, chicken, sweet corn and garden vegetables into a very expensive box of spoiled food. During winter, meanwhile, the same outage can become dangerous surprisingly fast.

That’s why this week’s warning deserves more attention than another political argument over who deserves the blame.

Before we argue about the grid, we’d better understand how dependent we’ve become upon it.

The Grid Is A Balancing Act That Never Stops

Electricity is unusual because grid operators must continuously balance supply and demand. When millions of people come home on a brutally hot afternoon and crank down their thermostats, generating resources have to meet that demand.

When a generating unit unexpectedly trips offline, something else has to make up the difference. When transmission lines become constrained, operators have to find another way to move electricity where it’s needed.

Most days, you never notice any of this.

That’s actually the remarkable part.

Thousands of generators, substations, transmission lines, utilities and control centers quietly work together so you can plug in a coffee pot without wondering whether enough electricity exists at that exact moment to operate it.

But extreme weather can squeeze the margin. That’s when words like reserves, emergency generation, load management and eventually rotating outages start becoming considerably more important.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration explains that the nation’s electric system ties together generators, transmission networks, distribution systems and consumers. Keeping that enormous network functioning requires electricity supply and demand to remain in balance.

And that’s where this story becomes very real.

A Rolling Blackout Isn’t A Tree Falling On A Line

Most rural folks have experienced a normal outage. A thunderstorm rolls through, a tree comes down, a transformer blows and somewhere down the road a utility crew starts putting things back together.

A rotating outage is different. It can be used when the available electric system cannot safely serve all demand and operators need to reduce load to protect the larger grid.

Instead of allowing a wider system failure, portions of electricity demand may be deliberately disconnected. Your electricity isn’t necessarily out because a tree landed on the line outside town.

Your electricity can be out because the system needs your house to stop using electricity.

Think about what that tells us.

There are circumstances where protecting the larger electric system can require intentionally removing customers from it. That’s one reason the federal government maintains preparedness guidance specifically for power outages.

The Best Time To Prepare Is While The Refrigerator Is Still Humming

Preparedness gets mocked because people tend to picture the most extreme version of it — a bunker, 20 years of beans and some fellow with 14 rifles and a pallet of toilet paper.

That’s not what we’re talking about.

Start with one simple question: What stops working at my house when the power goes out?

Then walk through the answer before you need it. If you’re on a well, how much drinking water do you have stored, and can you get additional water without electricity?

How long can your refrigerator and freezer stay cold? Do you have flashlights where you can actually find them in the dark? Can you cook, charge a phone and receive emergency information if your internet connection disappears?

Then think beyond the house. If you have livestock, what equipment depends upon electricity? What happens to watering systems, ventilation fans, electric fencing, milk refrigeration or other essential equipment?

That’s preparedness.

Nothing dramatic about it.

A Generator Doesn’t Help If It Won’t Start

Then there’s backup power. Plenty of rural homes have generators sitting in sheds, garages and barns, and that’s a good start.

But a generator that hasn’t been started in two years isn’t a backup plan.

It’s a question mark.

Start it before you need it. Put it under a safe load, check the oil and fuel, inspect cords and transfer equipment, and make sure the people who might actually need to use it know what they’re doing.

There’s one precaution here that isn’t negotiable. Portable generators produce carbon monoxide, and CDC warns they should never be operated inside a home, garage or other enclosed space.

If you’ve gone with solar panels and batteries instead, learn what the system can actually operate. There’s a huge difference between keeping a refrigerator, freezer, radio and several lights running and trying to power an entire electrically heated house.

Know your numbers before the lights go out.

Your Freezer Is A Battery Made Out Of Food

Here’s another thing homesteaders understand better than most. That chest freezer in the basement isn’t merely an appliance.

It’s stored labor.

There may be a quarter of a steer in there, along with last fall’s venison, green beans from July, sweet corn from August and a few chickens you raised from chicks.

Lose electricity long enough and you don’t merely lose groceries. You can lose months of work and hundreds — sometimes thousands — of dollars worth of food.

The federal government’s food-safety guidance for power outages says a full freezer can generally maintain a safe temperature for about 48 hours if the door remains closed, while a half-full freezer is closer to 24 hours.

That’s another reason to have a plan before the outage starts. Know which freezer gets backup power first, keep thermometers inside and resist the temptation to keep opening the lid to see whether everything is still frozen.

There’s Another Elephant Walking Into The Power Plant

The pressure on America’s grid isn’t coming only from hot weather. Electricity demand itself is changing, and some of the biggest new loads aren’t houses or factories.

They’re data centers.

Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, advanced manufacturing and broader electrification are changing forecasts for American electricity demand. The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that data centers consumed roughly 4.4 percent of U.S. electricity in 2023 and could consume approximately 6.7 to 12 percent by 2028.

That is a remarkable change for something most Americans never see.

Huge buildings full of computer servers may be hundreds of miles away, but the electricity they require still has to come from somewhere. New generation and transmission take time to build, while demand can arrive much faster.

America is asking its electrical system to do more.

For the average family, though, there’s a simpler lesson: don’t build your entire household around the assumption that electricity will always be available.

Two Is One, One Is None

Old homesteaders didn’t call it redundancy. They simply kept another way of doing things.

Wood stove and furnace. Well and stored water. Electric lights and lanterns. Freezer and canned food. Pickup truck and tractor. Garden and grocery store.

Today we’d call that resilience.

Grandpa would’ve called it common sense.

You don’t have to disconnect from the electric grid to become less dependent upon it. You simply need enough alternatives that one broken link doesn’t bring your household to a standstill.

That’s the heart of off-grid thinking. It’s not running away from civilization or expecting catastrophe around every corner.

It’s refusing to let one switch control everything your family needs.

The Warning Came Before The Blackout

Maybe the most useful thing about this week’s grid story is what didn’t happen. There wasn’t a massive blackout across 13 states, and tens of millions of people didn’t suddenly lose electricity.

Instead, grid operators and government officials prepared. Additional resources were made available and emergency authority was put in place to provide more options if conditions deteriorated.

In other words, they didn’t wait until the system failed before preparing for the possibility.

There’s a lesson in that for the rest of us.

You don’t wait for the well pump to stop before storing water. You don’t wait for the freezer to warm before testing the generator, and you don’t wait for the ice storm before discovering the flashlight batteries died sometime around Easter.

You prepare while everything still works.

Because someday you may flip that familiar little switch on the kitchen wall…

…and nothing will happen.

When that day comes, it won’t matter much whether the trouble started at a power plant, transmission line, substation, thunderstorm or an overloaded regional grid.

The house will be dark either way.

And the families who prepared while the lights were still on will be the ones who barely miss a beat.

Source: https://www.offthegridnews.com/grid-threats/67-million-americans-got-a-coded-warning-about-the-power-grid/