"Christmas week’s fierce “bomb cyclone” has put new urgency behind a critical issue for the nation’s power system — how grid owners and operators prepare for extreme weather emergencies.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the grid security monitor, are beginning a joint investigation of Winter Storm Elliott, which swept across the U.S. with deadly cold, paralyzing snowstorms and destructive winds.
On Christmas Eve, over 1.6 million U.S. customers lacked power, PowerOutage.us reported. At the storm’s peak impact, more than 60 percent of the country was under winter weather alerts, weather.com reported. That came after NERC warned in November that areas of the U.S. that face prolonged winter weather could see power supplies “seriously challenged” by harsh new storm assaults."
