Source: Utility Drive

Excerpt:

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. on Monday issued its highest alert level ever, urging generators and transmission owners to take measures to prepare for winter.

In its first Level 3 Essential Actions alert, NERC cited three “extreme winter weather events between 2018 and 2022. Severely cold winter weather knocked power plants offline in 2018 in the South Central U.S., in 2021 in Winter Storm Uri and last year in Winter Storm Elliott, leading to power shortages and outages, NERC said.

“When cold weather events such as Winter Storm Uri occur, system operators may need to shed firm customer load to prevent uncontrolled load shedding and cascading outages which may not only result in major disruption but also have very real human consequences,” the grid watchdog organization said.

The alert asks power plant owners to calculate the “extreme cold weather temperature,” or ECWT, for their generating units and include that number — the lowest 0.2 percentile of the hourly temperatures measured in December, January and February since 2000 — in their winter preparedness plans.

Read more: NERC urges power plant, transmission owners to prepare for winter in highest-level alert ever issued