Rolling blackouts

From the Boston Globe:

Electricity officials are bracing for unprecedented rolling blackouts if New England faces a severe cold snap that overtaxes supplies of natural gas used for both heating homes and generating power.

If the winter is mild, officials foresee few problems maintaining adequate electric supplies, according to a forecast to be issued today. But officials at Independent System Operator New England, the Holyoke organization that manages the six-state electric grid, fear a repeat of brutally cold weather like that of January 2004 that could force them to shut off power to hundreds of thousands of people and businesses for one or two hours at a time to conserve available electricity.

New England set records for wintertime electric and gas demand—and came close to rolling blackouts—in January 2004 when temperatures stayed below 10 degrees on three separate days in a single week and hit a 24-year low of 7 below zero at Logan International Airport in Boston.

Winter has been mild so far, but that’s fairly typical of our weather through at least the middle of December. But the weather forecasts leave little doubt that we’re going to have a colder than usual winter in January and February. Sometime tonight, another arctic cold front is supposed to move in with much colder than usual temperatures for December and we have less gas than we had last year. Furnaces will be grinding away all over the region for the next several days. Add the extra load from Christmas lighting and I think all bets are off.

One third of our electricity is generated with natural gas and it’s in short supply. The article claims we won’t have to worry about natural gas delivery for cooking and heating, but they fail to mention that those households that heat with gas require electricity to start their furnaces. Same holds true for houses that heat with oil. A couple of hours of no electricity in frigid temperatures means already chillier than usual houses will get really cold, really fast.

But, if it happens, thousands of people will suddenly be focused on our current and growing energy problems like never before. We obviously need to figure out some alternatives and different ways to manage what we have. Conserve isn’t a word public officials have uttered yet. That may quickly change. Should the next hurricane season be anything like this one, we’ll really be up the creek. Gas and oil production in the Gulf of Mexico haven’t yet recovered from this season and the new hurricane season starts in 6 short months.