The largest U.S. regional electric grid on Tuesday reported nearly 18 gigawatts of power plant outages, leaving a region of 67 million people with a thin buffer of power supplies against frigid weather and a forecast for record-breaking winter demand. The PJM Interconnection reported that most of the generation outages are due to power plants being forced offline amid freezing weather and constricted supplies of natural gas for the region. PJM, which serves 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states and Washington DC, predicts an all-time winter demand record on Tuesday of 145.5 gigawatts, partly due to the around-the-clock electricity needs of data centers.
But that expected record could be broken later in the week as the cold snap hovering over the Eastern United States persists.The grid operator predicts demand could top 146 GW on Thursday, according to PJM data.
Spot wholesale electricity prices in PJM’s territory averaged about $342 per MWh Tuesday morning as power plants paid higher natural gas prices. In the PJM zone served by Dominion Energy spot prices were $640 per MWh, reflecting power plant disruptions that accounted for about half of the forced outages in PJM.
(Reporting by Tim McLaughlin, Editing by Louise Heavens and Chizu Nomiyama )