“Freeze-offs” refer to interruptions in natural gas production and transport caused by freezing water or gas hydrates blocking flow during cold snaps, leading to supply issues.
This was a huge part of the problem in Texas’ Valentine’s Day blackout of 2021.
Big polar vortex freeze coming. In my part of central Michigan, we are expecting single digits, and below zero F temperatures by next weekend.
Buckle up.
President Donald Trump has made it his mission to banish offshore wind farms from America. He has derided wind energy as unreliable and expensive while freezing permitting and halting projects already under construction.
Yet a new report suggests that the president’s moves could be working against grid reliability in key parts of the country. Along the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, offshore wind can play a critical role in keeping the lights on year-round, especially through the winter, according to a study published this month by New York City–based consultancy Charles River Associates.
Trump’s attacks on offshore wind and other renewable sectors come amid dire challenges for the nation’s power system. The world’s wealthiest companies are building power-hungry data centers as grid infrastructure ages and households’ energy bills skyrocket. The White House itself has declared an “energy emergency,” which it’s using to push for more fossil-gas, coal, and nuclear power plants.
But offshore wind is well suited to “meeting the moment,” in part because gas plants are reliable in the summer but can buckle under winter weather, according to the study. Ocean winds in the Northeast are at their strongest and steadiest in winter months, making turbines there a way to boost the reliability of power grids connected to underperforming gas plants.
Oliver Stover, a coauthor of the study, called offshore wind farms a “near-term solution,” saying that turbines at sea and gas plants on land complement each other throughout the Northeast’s changing seasons: “They’re stronger together.”
Stover explained that if grid reliability is the goal, it makes sense for planned offshore wind farms to reach completion. Those projects will help regional grids burdened by extreme winter weather and data-center demands “buy time” as more infrastructure is built.
“Every megawatt is a good megawatt,” he said.
The periods in which offshore wind performs best also align with the time of increasing grid strain: winter mornings and evenings, when people tend to crank up the heat. While peak electricity demand has historically happened during the summer months, it is shifting to these winter moments in many parts of the country, largely due to the mass electrification of space-heating systems.
That means securing power generation during colder months must be, according to Stover, “a priority going forward.”
Stover and his colleagues aren’t the first to underscore the reliability benefits of offshore wind. Other analysts, along with grid operators, have warned that Trump’s efforts to squash certain projects that East Coast states were planning to rely on could raise blackout risks and power bills in the region.
Although resource adequacy concerns were once concentrated in the summer, many markets now face their greatest vulnerabilities in the winter. Electrification of space heating is driving rapid winter load growth, while cold weather places stress on natural gas systems, which continue to supply most of the dispatchable fleet.
Winter Storms Uri (2021) and Elliott (2022) revealed how exposed the grid becomes when gas supplies are disrupted by pipeline freezes or competing heating demand. Even in markets where peak demand still occurs in the summer, operators are increasingly concerned about winter performance, with some now describing their systems as summer-peaking but winter-constrained.
Across much of the country, winter mornings and evenings are emerging as the periods of greatest stress – times when solar output is minimal, heating demand is elevated, and storage resources may already be depleted.
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Across all markets, OSW (Off Shore Wind) provides a stronger reliability contribution than any other renewable resource, generally delivering about twice the capacity value of solar and roughly fifty percent more than onshore wind. However, there is significant variability by market. In PJM, its reliability contribution is greater than short-duration storage and approaches that of thermal peaking units
without dual fuel, reflecting its strong performance during winter and evening hours when system stress is greatest.
In New York, OSW ranks as the highest-accredited renewable resource – two to three times that of solar or onshore wind – while its proximity to downstate
load pockets further amplifies its reliability benefit. In New England, OSW’s contribution rivals that of dispatchable generation and far exceeds that of storage or other renewables during prolonged cold spells.
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The most vivid recent example of multiple failures in gas power plants was the famous Valentine’s Day Blackout in Texas, 2021.
The Fox News machine went into overdrive to blame the grid failure, which resulted in hundreds of deaths, on clean energy, particularly frozen wind turbines. Media fact checks, such as the contemporaneous one below from WFAA in Dallas, showed this to be grossly misleading.
As the graph below shows, though the polar freeze extended over the entire midsection of the country, it was Texas that overwhelmingly suffered from outages, mostly due to the lack of weatherization requirements on all Texas power plants, including both gas, and wind, for that matter.
More northerly areas, which also rely heavily on wind turbines, saw no outages, because those states enforce adequate cold weather precautions on utilities and developers. Notably, Iowa, which had very cold weather conditions, but essentially no blackouts.
Below, my own interviews with Texas experts on the events of that week shows a pretty clear picture that renewables, if anything, performed above expectations.
If you watched the above, it’s worth a look at what Texas Governor Abbott told Fox News the very same day he described the massive thermal outages across the state.
UPDATE:
I’m not having any of this!
I demand to speak to the manager!