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While Pennsylvania's power grid is gradually shifting towards renewable energies, the state continues to rely heavily on natural gas to meet its power needs. In this transitional period, ensuring the reliability of the power grid is crucial -- and expanding existing oversight might be necessary.
The US electric grid has been correctly identified as a modern-day necessity that must be reliable for users, and the federal government has ensured robust reliability standards.
Since 2006, the federally-recognized North American Electric Reliability Corporation has developed and enforced compliance across US electric grids.
For regional enforcers, this includes everything from auditing utility companies, handling internal cybersecurity, cutting back overgrown vegetation near power lines, and preparing the electric power grid for severe weather.
But none of these same stringent standards are applied to the natural gas grid. That's a major problem, because natural gas is the largest power source underpinning electricity production.
Over half of all electricity is generated through the use of natural gas, and as long as the gas network is unreliable, the electric grid will be, too.
The consequences of an unreliable power grid are dire. When severe weather hits unprepared and unregulated infrastructure, it leads to scenarios like the Texas outages in 2021, in which catastrophic power losses resulted in up to 800 deaths.
Texas had famously avoided federal regulation of its power grid for decades leading up the storm. Pennsylvania's own power grid experienced some of the same failures last year during Winter Storm Elliott, albeit on a much smaller scale, as many power plants couldn't start up or broke down in the extreme cold. Seventy percent of outages came from the natural gas sector.
It could have been much worse, and experts know it. "We narrowly dodged a crisis last year," Jim Robb, president and CEO of the NERC, said in written remarks accompanying the final report on the lessons learned from Elliot.
He said the breakdown of the system reflected the "extraordinary interconnectedness of the gas and electric systems," as well as their "combined vulnerability."
It also underscores the need for congressional and state legislation to establish reliability rules for natural gas infrastructure, and to increase communication between natural gas suppliers and electric grid operators during extreme weather events.
These systems are inextricably linked, and addressing the reliability of only one will never be sufficient.
Natural gas, for better or worse, is our most reliable source of energy for the time being, and its infrastructure must be handled with the same responsibility and regulation as the electrical grid.
-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette