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This summer, power grids worldwide won’t produce enough electricity to meet the soaring demand, threatening more than one billion people with rolling blackouts. Grids are stretched thin by fossil fuel shortages, drought and heatwaves, commodity disruptions and soaring prices due to the war in Ukraine, and the failed green energy transition where grid operators retired too many fossil fuel generation plants. Combine this all together, and a perfect storm of blackouts threatens much of the Northern Hemisphere.
The power crisis, affecting a large swath of the world and top economies, could be less than a month away when summer begins on June 21. Regions that concerned Bloomberg are Asia, Europe, and the US, where there’s not enough power to go around when cooling demand is set to surge as households crank up their air conditions to escape the sweltering heat.
Asia’s heatwave has caused hours-long daily blackouts, putting more than 1 billion people at risk across Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and India, with little relief in sight. Six Texas power plants failed earlier this month as the summer heat just began to arrive, offering a preview of what’s to come. At least a dozen US states from California to the Great Lakes are at risk of electricity outages this summer. Power supplies will be tight in China and Japan. South Africa is poised for a record year of power cuts. And Europe is in a precarious position that’s held up by Russia — if Moscow cuts off natural gas to the region, that could trigger rolling outages in some countries. –Bloomberg
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A massive power outage was reported on Tuesday across several Eurasia countries that left millions in the dark.
Reuters reports Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan found themselves without power today. All three ex-Soviet republics have interconnected power grids connected to Russia.
The source of the disruption could be due to Kazakhstan’s North-South power line, which links its two neighbors to power stations in northern Kazakhstan and the Russian power grid. On Tuesday morning, Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company (KEGOC) said “emergency imbalances” resulted in disruptions.
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France’s electricity grid is coming under strain, and the next cold snap could be devastating for the country as energy-intensive manufacturers would experience reduced power, according to a new report published by French power grid operator Reseau de Transport d’Electricite (RTE).
RTE said due to the lack of wind and nuclear power generation. The next cold snap would force it to cut electricity to energy-intensive companies to stabilize the grid. There’s even the possibility widespread rolling blackouts could be implemented for two hours to mitigate grid collapse during peak energy demand.
The good news is that weather forecasting models provided by Bloomberg don’t show an imminent cold blast for the first half of January.
“Based on the latest forecast for January, such meteorological events — including a severe cold snap — seem very unlikely for the start of the month, and less likely for the rest of the month,” RTE said. “Hence, the risk of power cuts is essentially ruled out at least for the start of January.”
Mild temperatures and a flotilla of liquefied natural gas tankers have been a temporary relief for Europe, sending Dutch TTF natural gas and power prices lower in the last week.
France’s grid remains under pressure but not as bad as last week when day-ahead power prices rose to the highest level since 2009 and have since halved. Prices remain at extremely high levels.
Energy inflation is a politically sensitive issue for President Emmanuel Macron ahead of April’s presidential elections. If renewable power generation lags, nuclear reactors remain halted for maintenance, and natural gas prices remain elevated, then higher power bills into January and February could create more unpopularity for Macron.
Europe’s energy crisis worsened this week when Kosovo introduced rolling blackouts to most of its two million citizens, according to Bloomberg.
On Thursday, the Kosovo Energy Distribution Services (KEDS) announced rolling two-hour power blackouts for 2 million people due to an “overload” of its electrical grid.
KEDS asked customers to reduce power given “insufficient internal generation to cover consumption and the global energy crisis.”
Simultaneously, Serbia was forced to cut electricity to customers, Britain’s network operator issued a power supply warning, and France’s nuclear plant outage, all culminated into a perfect storm of straining the continent’s grid, resulting in reduced power supplies and exorbitantly high prices.
Last week, Kosovo’s economy minister, Artane Rizvanolli, said the shuttering of the nation’s main coal-fired power plant had worsened the energy crisis. He said power imports were “extremely costly.”
Grid data from Entso-E shows electricity imports from Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia plunged from 750 megawatts on Wednesday to about 469 megawatts on Thursday.
Jeremy Weir, CEO of commodities trader Trafigura Group, warned that more European countries could face rolling blackouts in the event of a severe winter.
Eleven European associations (from steel to fertilizers to cement to paper mills) published a memo Thursday indicating energy-intensive companies are paying “unbearably high energy prices” that may force them to shutter operations.
However, there is good news for the continent as benchmark Dutch front-month gas plunged as much as 43% from a peak of 180 euros per megawatt-hour to around 102 euros in the last several days as a flotilla of US liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers is headed to the fuel-starved continent.
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Europe’s energy crisis is about to get a whole lot worse as the Northern Hemisphere winter is just weeks away. New risks are emerging across the continent that households and companies might have to scale back on power use or even plan for rolling blackouts.
There is no immediate fix to the energy crisis that comes from the supply side, with Russia’s Gazprom, the largest supplier of natural gas to Europe, only pumping what it has. At the same time, EU stockpiles remain well below trend.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mario Draghi said Italy’s government is ready to combat soaring energy prices for households, according to Bloomberg.
“We set aside 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) in June and over 3 billion euros in September,” Draghi said. “We are now taking steps in the budget and are prepared to continue doing so, with particular attention to the most vulnerable.”
“Given the current energy supply system, a blackout cannot be ruled out” across Europe, Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said, adding that “it’s important to neutralize the impact of increased energy bills on households and companies in the fairest way possible.”
Even before the winter season arrives, cold weather is driving energy prices across Europe to record highs. The massive rally in European gas prices is not diminishing anytime soon. Gas prices at the Dutch TTF hub, the benchmark gas price for Europe, jumped to €100 per MWh, adding more pressure on households who are already dealing with rapid food and shelter inflation.
Just yesterday, power prices in France jumped to the highest levels since 2012.
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Blackouts have long been a thing of the past in most major cities but that has started to change. According to Bloomberg, the energy crisis that is rippling through Asia and Europe could unleash similar electricity shortages and blackouts in the United States. Soaring natural gas prices are forcing U.S. utilities to quickly turn to more coal…
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Over half of India’s 135 coal-fired power plants, which in total supply around 70 per cent of the country’s electricity, have fuel stocks of less than three days
Power Crisis: Coal-fired power plants are facing shortage of coal
There could be a blackout in the national capital in the next two days if coal supplies to power plants do not improve, a Delhi minister said today. Delhi joins a long queue of states including Tamil Nadu and Odisha that have raised concerns over long power cuts due to shortage of coal in power plants.
Over half of India’s 135 coal-fired power plants, which in total supply around 70 per cent of the country’s electricity, have fuel stocks of less than three days, data from the central grid operator showed, news agency Reuters had reported earlier this week.
“If coal supply doesn’t improve, there will be a blackout in Delhi in two days,” the national capital’s Power Minister Satyendra Jain said today. “The coal-fired power plants that supply electricity to Delhi have to keep a minimum coal stock of one month, but now it has come down to one day,” Mr Jain said.
“Our request to the centre is that railway wagons should be arranged and coal should be transported to the plants soonest. All the plants are already running in only 55 per cent capacity,” the minister in Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government said.
Mr Jain alleged the coal crisis appears to be “man-made, just as the crisis of medical oxygen supply during the COVID-19 second wave.”
“There is politics going on. If you create a crisis, it will seem that some great work has been done by solving it,” the Delhi minister said.
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The energy crisis that is rippling through Asia and Europe could unleash electricity shortages and blackouts in the U.S., according to Bloomberg.
Ernie Thrasher, CEO of Xcoal Energy & Resources LLC., told energy research firm IHS Markit that U.S. utilities quickly turn to more coal because of soaring natural gas prices.
“We’ve actually had discussions with power utilities who are concerned that they simply will have to implement blackouts this winter,” Thrasher warned.
He said, “They don’t see where the fuel is coming from to meet demand,” adding that 23% of utilities are switching away from gas this fall/winter to burn more coal.
With natgas, coal, and oil prices all soaring is a clear signal the green energy transition will take decades, not years. Walking back fossil fuels for unreliable clean energy has been a disaster in Asia and Europe. These power-hungry continents are scrambling for fossil fuel supplies as stockpiles are well below seasonal trends ahead of cooler weather.
A similar story is playing out in the U.S., where increased demand for coal might not be reached by mining companies. We noted Thursday morning that boosting output might be challenging due to years of decommissioning mines to reduce carbon emissions and transition the economy from fossil fuels to green energy. There’s also been a steady decline of miners over the last three and a half decades.
“That whole supply chain is stretched beyond its limits,” Thrasher said. “It’s going to be a challenging winter for us here in the United States.”
Utility company Duke Energy Corp.’s Piedmont Natural Gas unit, covering North and South Carolina customers, warned power bills this winter are set to rise due to high natgas prices and low production.
While the Taliban are clearly preoccupied with the security situation inside the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as emphasized by Sunday’s bombing at a major mosque in Kabul (ironically, the former insurgents are facing an insurgency of their own led by ISIS-Khorasan, the Islamic State’s Central Asian faction), there’s an even more pressing issue currently confronting Afghanistan’s new leadership.
It’s looking increasingly likely that the Central Asian suppliers who contribute roughly half of the country’s electricity are getting ready to pull the plug, according to the guy who used to run Afghanistan’s state power authority, Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat, which he quit roughly two weeks after the Taliban takeover and likely fled. He at least felt safe enough to tell WSJ that the consequences of the Taliban not making good with Afghanistan’s Central Asian power suppliers could be “really dangerous.”
“The consequences would be countrywide, but especially in Kabul. There will be blackout and it would bring Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages when it comes to power and to telecommunications,” said Mr. Noorzai, who remains in close contact with DABS’s remaining management. “This would be a really dangerous situation.”
Afghanistan lacks a national power grid, and is thus dependent on a network of suppliers in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to supply roughly half the country’s power, while Iran supplies some in the western part of the country. Domestic production inside Afghanistan mostly relies on hydroelectric power grids, which haven’t been functioning at anywhere near full capacity due to a drought.
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A fire in a subsea cable has dramatically reduced power imports from France until March, U.K.’s National Grid Plc said, deepening the energy crisis that threatens winter blackouts for millions.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Before the fire, the U.K. was already experiencing a five-year low in spare winter capacity. Compound this with gas shortages and the lack of renewable energy sources, sending power prices on a record-breaking run. The country may experience grid chaos in the coming months.
“If we don’t start to remedy the situation, we are going to be facing blackouts this winter,” Catherine Newman, chief executive officer of Limejump Ltd., a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, told Bloomberg on Thursday. “If things don’t start to reverse soon, we will see the industry getting turned off across the board.”
“If anything goes wrong, we might not have anything left in the back pocket,” said Tom Edwards, a consultant at Cornwall Insight Ltd., an adviser to the government and utilities. “If a nuke trips offline or something else big, that could cause issues because we might not have anything to replace it.”
Britain receives power via six subsea cables, and two of them are connected to France’s power grids of more than 56 nuclear power plants.
The cable’s total capacity will be shut off until March 2022. The shortage is expected to exacerbate power price volatility when peak demand is seen in the winter months.
“The outage is going to lift the potential for price volatility as long as its offline,” said Glenn Rickson, head of power analysis at S&P Global Platts.
The compounding energy crunch is fueling concerns about inflation when the economy is still recovering from the pandemic.
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Future electricity systems must be made more resilient
Prolonged blackouts in Louisiana following Hurricane Ida are a reminder the power grid needs to become more resilient as well as reliable if even more services such as electric vehicles are going to depend on it in future.
The electricity system is already directly responsible for providing a wide range of energy services in homes, offices and factories, including space heating, air-conditioning, cooking, refrigeration and power. The grid is also at the heart of a collection of other critical systems, including oil and gas supply, water and sewerage, transport, communications, public safety and healthcare, which cannot function properly without it.
In future, the grid is likely to be responsible for the provision of even more energy services as policymakers push to electrify many remaining services as part of the strategy for achieving net zero emissions.
But in the rush to electrify the entire energy system, policymakers may be inadvertently increasing the vulnerability of the economy and society in the event of a large-area, long-duration power failure.
Rather than several closely connected but separate systems for electricity, gas, oil, and transport, in future there will increasingly be only one very tightly integrated system, increasing its vulnerability to catastrophic failure.
The risk created by linking formerly separate systems into a central system prone to a single point of failure has been understood for decades (“Brittle power: energy strategy for national security“, Lovins, 1982). In particular, the more tightly coupled systems become, the greater the risk an unanticipated problem in one part could cascade through the whole (“Normal accidents: living with high-risk technologies“, Perrow, 1999).
At present, blackouts render some services unavailable (lighting, power), but households and businesses may be able to use others (gas heating, gasoline vehicles). In future, blackouts could disrupt substantially all energy services.
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As Germans continue to ‘enjoy’ the highest power bills in Europe, critics are warning that green energy solutions aren’t being deployed quickly enough amid the closure of its last nuclear reactor, and a sharp (and possibly early) reduction in coal electricity generation – putting the country’s ability to meet peak demand over the next two years in jeopardy.
This, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party slumping to an all-time low in popularity.
“There is no doubt that security of supply must be high on the priority list of the next government and political action is urgent,” said RWE energy’s chief economist, Alexander Nolden. “The new climate law is a real game changer for Germany. It means a much higher ambition and will demand much higher speed for the changes needed.”
Merkel admits her government got it wrong. Power demand will probably increase more than official forecasts by the end of the decade, she said in June. A month earlier she recognized that increasing local opposition and too much bureaucracy have curbed investments in green power.
For a long time, Germany showed the world how renewable energy could be added to make up a substantial share of the power mix. Now, the Norwegian utility Statkraft SF says it takes twice as long to build a wind park in Germany compared with the U.S. Complaints from locals, a lack of space, stricter environmental standards and a longer permitting process are just some of the reasons growth is slowing. -Bloomberg
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Two inexorable energy trends are underway in California: soaring electricity prices and ever-worsening reliability – and both trends bode ill for the state’s low- and middle-income consumers.
Last week, the state’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator, issued a “flex alert” that asked the state’s consumers to reduce their power use “to reduce stress on the grid and avoid power outages.” CAISO’s warning of impending electricity shortages heralds another blackout-riddled summer at the same time California’s electricity prices are skyrocketing.
In 2020, California’s electricity prices jumped by 7.5%, making it the biggest price increase of any state in the country last year and nearly seven times the increase that was seen in the United States as a whole. According to data from the Energy Information Administration, the all-sector price of electricity in California last year jumped to 18.15 cents per kilowatt-hour, which means that Californians are now paying about 70% more for their electricity than the U.S. average all-sector rate of 10.66 cents per kWh. Even more worrisome: California’s electricity rates are expected to soar over the next decade. (More on that in a moment.)
The surging cost of electricity will increase the energy burden being borne by low- and middle-income Californians. High energy costs have a particularly regressive effect in California, which has the highest poverty rate – and some of the highest electricity prices – in the country. In 2020, California’s all-sector electricity prices were the third-highest in the continental U.S., behind only Rhode Island (18.55 cents per kWh) and Connecticut (19.19 cents per kWh.)
Before going further, let me state the obvious: California policymakers are providing a case study in how not to manage an electric grid…
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It has been an arid spring in California, and that’s causing alarm with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. executives who have said this week they will need more frequent power cuts to customers in Northern California to prevent wildfires.
PG&E’s chief risk officer Sumeet Singh told WSJ that California’s dry weather conditions could result in more rolling blackouts this year than last year. The company has trimmed trees away from powerlines and inspected the grid as the wildfire season began earlier this month.
June is typically the month the wildfire season in California begins. The state is already battling an extreme drought, and the first heat wave of the season hit last week. The risks of another heat wave are increasing for next week.
The hottest and most fire-prone months are nearing as a second heat wave of the season could arrive as early as next week.
How the season turns out may depend on the immediate climate in the state. Extreme heat and drought are several factors that may produce dry fuels and eventually spark fires.
“The fuel moisture levels … are about a month or two months ahead of schedule,” Strenfel told Sacramento Bee. “They’re at a state where they’re typically this dry in mid-July, and we’re seeing them in June. We’re a month ahead of schedule, if not two months, in terms of fire danger.”
Singh told WSJ, “the big, big variable that’s unpredictable here is the wind. But in all the forecasts that we’ve done, we do not see ourselves getting back to the same kind of [power shut-off] events like we saw in 2019.”
Already, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared 41 of the state’s 58 counties are in a drought, with much of the state in an “extreme drought” and portions in an “exceptional drought.”
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