Extremely cold winter storms hit many parts of the United States and Canada over the Christmas weekend, disrupting holiday travel and leaving millions without power or facing rolling blackouts.
Utilities from Texas to New York City are urging customers to conserve power to protect supplies. Grid operator PJM Interconnection LLC said companies could be forced to implement rolling outages as the cold pushes up demand to almost unprecedented levels.
The cold weather is coming from the West so fast and so intensely that PJM, which manages the grid from Illinois to Virginia, has a 7 GW shortfall in peak-hour capacity compared to demand forecasts. This is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 7 million households per day in normal times.
Rolling outages remain a “real potential risk,” said Michael Bryson, senior vice president of operations at PJM Interconnection LLC.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul mobilized the National Guard to Erie Country, the western part of the state hardest hit by the storm, which she said “could go down as one of the worst in history.” Hochul visited hard-hit Queens and said she has asked the federal government to declare a disaster area.
Meanwhile, thousands of flights were canceled or delayed on both Saturday and Sunday, according to FlightAware data, and road trips are dangerous, forcing some to cancel Christmas plans.
The data showed that on Saturday, 7,104 flights were delayed and 3,119 flights were canceled within the United States, in and out of the United States.
Temperatures were 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit (11-17 degrees Celsius) below normal across much of the central and eastern U.S., with snow totals at or near record levels in parts of the Midwest, the National Weather Service said. According to data from the Meteorological Bureau, on the 24th local time, the temperature in the Pittsburgh area in southwestern Pennsylvania dropped to minus 13.89 degrees Celsius, breaking the record for the coldest Christmas Eve temperature in history set in 1983.
This extremely cold storm, which is rare in history, has even begun to affect energy and food prices in the United States.
According to the report, on December 23 local time, the supply of natural gas in the 48 states of the continental United States dropped by nearly 10 billion cubic feet from the previous day, a drop of 10%. The reason is that deep freezes have occurred in areas with the highest natural gas production, such as Texas, which has caused liquids in pipelines to freeze and natural gas production to be shut down.
Affected by this, West Texas natural gas prices surged 22% to $9/MMBtu on Friday, and WTI crude oil futures prices rose 2.39% to $79.34/barrel.
In addition, the extreme cold weather exacerbated the market’s concerns about the reduction of crop production in the United States. Among them, the U.S. Chicago hard red winter wheat futures price has risen for the fifth consecutive day, which is the longest wave of gains since August; highest since the month.
