Welcome to Grid Brief! Here’s what we’re looking at today: power outages hit the East Coast as a winter storm continues, the EIA expects solar to be the main generation source added to the grid, and more.

Half A Million On East Coast Lost Power

As a winter storm batters the East Coast, 500,000 Americans saw their lights go out—with more bad news to follow.

“New York was the hardest hit state, with nearly 143,000 customers out, followed by Pennsylvania with about 105,000 outages, North Carolina with about 70,000 outages, and New Jersey with about 58,000 outages,” reports Reuters.

New York has its own power market, Pennsylvania and New Jersey sit in PJM, and North Carolina is a traditional monopoly area.

PJM, America’s largest power market, has also issued cold weather advisory for its western region between the 14th and 15th of this month as arctic air descends upon most of the US.

Weather advisory notices are intended to give power plant owners time to ready themselves for cold weather while updating the grid operator about their generators’ status and availability.

PJM expects to have 181,000 MW of resources to meet a winter peak of 137,000 MW.

As we covered in our latest What’s Keeping the Lights On—available to Premium subscribers—Texas’s grid operator has issued a similar notice for the same timeframe as PJM. Texas’s current demand forecast for next Tuesday is an all-time peak, beating out this summer’s demand records.

EIA: Solar to Supply All Gen Growth to ‘25

The Energy Information Administration expects solar to make up the vast majority of new energy in America between now and 2025.

“We expect solar power to be the leading source of growth in electricity generation in both 2024 and 2025 as 36 gigawatts (GW) and 43 GW of new solar capacity come on line, respectively,” reports the EIA. “The new capacity will boost the solar share of total generation to 6% in 2024 and 7% in 2025, up from 4% in 2023.”

But the EIA also expects that America will lose dispatchable generation. It forecasts that coal generation will drop 9% this year and 10% in 2025 as more renewables come online and 12 GW of coal retires.

Natural gas generation is anticipated to remain the same.

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Conversation Starters

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• Japan delays a nuclear restart. “Japan's Tohoku Electric Power said on Wednesday it will delay the restart of reactor No. 2 at its Onagawa nuclear station due to additional safety construction works, keeping all its nuclear power plants shutdown since the 2011 earthquake,” reports Reuters. “Japan is gradually bringing nuclear power back to its energy mix in a move to reach carbon neutrality goals and to reduce imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) which it imports from elsewhere including from Russia.”

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Crom’s Blessing

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