How Reliable Is America’s Electrical Grid?
“We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electrical system.” That was the testimony of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Willie L. Phillips in a May 4, 2023, hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. FERC is the agency that regulates the interstate transmission and wholesale of electricity, and it is sounding the alarm about our electrical grid.
Until recently, Americans took electrical grid reliability for granted. “The average U.S. customer loses power less than two times per year for a total of less than five hours, which represents 99.95 percent reliability,” notes National Renewable Energy Laboratory grid analyst Paul Denholm. But that may be changing.
Former FERC Commissioner James Danly pointed out during the hearing that a large part of the growing challenge to electrical grid reliability stems from the “premature retirement of the dispatchable generators”—those power sources, such as coal-fired and natural gas plants, that can be adjusted rapidly to meet electricity demand.
The “premature retirement” of those power sources is largely because of federal efforts to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel plants to combat climate change. The result? Always-on coal and gas plants cannot compete with massively subsidized intermittent wind and solar power.
“Our nation’s grid infrastructure is nothing less than the backbone of the U.S. economy,” stated then–FERC commissioner Allison Clements. That backbone, according to the Energy Information Administration, includes nearly 160,000 miles of high-voltage power lines, millions of low-voltage power lines, and distribution transformers that altogether connect 145 million customers.
Clements proposed addressing the looming reliability crisis by coming up with ways to “improve the efficiency of the existing grid via grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) and leverage the potential of distributed energy sources,” such as wind and
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