It’s been nearly a year since rolling blackouts rippled across Shelby County over Christmas weekend 2022.

But if the same conditions sweep the area this winter, can it weather the storm?

“We understand that last winter is still very much on everybody’s mind,” said Doug McGowen, president and CEO of Memphis Light, Gas and Water. “There’s nothing we can do that’s foolproof. If the weather’s bad enough, we will have some kind of impact.” 

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But he hopes that won’t be the case. 

McGowen said MGLW and its power supplier, the Tennessee Valley Authority, have made changes since last year when the region’s grid froze and TVA implemented mandatory cuts for its electric customers. But it’s going to be an ongoing challenge in years to come, especially as TVA faces more overall demand for power. 

How the lights went out

When TVA couldn’t generate enough power for its customers last winter, it bought emergency power from neighboring power sources such as Duke Energy and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator. But the problem was bigger than TVA and its service areas.

Those providers that TVA called on were also grappling with the storm’s massive footprint and had to quit supplying power to TVA as they dealt with their own energy shortages.

On Dec. 23 of last year, TVA supplied more energy in a 24-hour period than at any other time in its 90-year history. As demand soared, TVA’s equipment failed, mostly because its machinery froze. 

TVA has spent $8 million upgrading its infrastructure since last year. They’ve added and upgraded insulation, built shelters around vulnerable equipment and added heat trace technology, which allows operators to remotely monitor the system’s temperature.

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“Most people don’t realize that many of our assets, especially natural gas plants, have vital systems that are located outside, which make their critical components more vulnerable to freezing temperatures,” said Jason Garrison, TVA Generation Services senior manager, in a statement. 

In the Memphis area, circuit breakers were an issue. When it was time to start staggering rolling blackouts across the city, MLGW remotely flipped the breakers off. But, once it was time to turn power back on for one group and turn if off for the next, they ran into problems. Some of the circuit breakers had frozen, and MLGW had to send crews out to fix them in person, adding to the time that some people spent without power. The utility has since winterized the breakers, using a remedy McGowen likened to antifreeze. 

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Two federal regulatory groups — the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) — recently shared a report with lessons learned during last year’s storm. They said last year’s failures showed the grid is severely challenged during extreme cold conditions, even when technology exists to avoid it.

“It’s just so rare that they experience that kind of polar bomb vortex here, that it was just not part of the design standard,” McGowen told The Daily Memphian. 

TVA said its goal is for the grid to be able to operate in -20 degree temperatures and 20 mile per hour winds for up to two days. NERC, the federal regulatory group, also adopted new reliability standards for cold weather in October. 

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“Winter is upon us, and the energy sector needs to implement these recommendations as quickly as possible,” NERC President and CEO Jim Robb said in a statement.

The temperature wasn’t the only problem. Winter Storm Uri — the ice storm that hit Memphis in 2021 — was colder, but last year presented a lethal combination of freezing temperatures that dropped quickly as well as wind and precipitation. 

This year, for the first time in a few years, the region entered an El Niño — a weather pattern that typically brings warmer, wetter winters. That’s on average, though, and doesn’t mean there won’t be extremely cold spells. In West Tennessee, there’s an equal chance that temperatures could swing above or below average, said NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. 

Don’t forget about the water

Winter weather doesn’t just create a power problem in Memphis, though.

During the 2021 ice storm, wells froze up and MLGW couldn’t pump enough water out of the ground for the system to maintain pressure. Unlike 2021, there was plenty of water last year. It was just being dumped into empty buildings. 

Unbeknownst to MLGW at the time, massive industrial fire sprinklers had frozen and burst, spewing more than 100 million gallons of water, per day, out of the system. But no one knew about the massive water loss until it was too late, either because the buildings were vacant or because they were unoccupied during the holidays.

MLGW doubled the amount of water pumped into the system to combat low pressure, but they couldn’t keep up and had to issue a precautionary boil water advisory. Some people spent six days under the advisory, and it lasted even longer for residents in north and southeast Shelby County. 

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MLGW has since coordinated with the fire department to get an inventory of those fire systems. That way, they’ll know where to check first if the pressure starts to drop. 

“It’s not a perfect system, but we’re trying to get a workable system, so we know where we’re bleeding water,” McGowen said.

MLGW is winterizing its water pumps and should be done by mid-December, and it’s added five more wells to the system.

Communication changes

McGowen was just a few weeks into his job leading MLGW when the holiday storm hit, and he was forced to issue rolling blackouts — a first for him and for Memphis.

“Everybody’s aware that it could happen now,” he said. “Before that, I think most people couldn’t fathom it could happen to us.” 

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He was still learning the ropes at the utility, and the whole city was learning how rolling blackouts work. It made for some miscommunication, between TVA and MLGW, as well as between MLGW and its customers.

MLGW leaders didn’t know what was happening until TVA told them to start rolling blackouts, McGowen said. Had they known earlier, he said they could’ve told customers to conserve energy as demand soared.

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“One of the things that I heard during the rolling blackouts was, ‘Hey, I understand why we might have to do this, but I sure would’ve like to have known ahead of time,’” McGowen said. 

Conserving energy is completely voluntary, but individual customers’ habits have a huge impact on demand. There are two predictable spikes on a given day: when people are waking up, cooking breakfast and getting ready for work, and again when they get home, cooking dinner, doing laundry and showering. If customers had voluntarily cut back, it might have staved off a crisis. 

There are some companies that get discounted electricity if they’ve sign an agreement to reduce power usage when the gridst is strained. MLGW didn’t even have enough notice last year to cut those customers off before TVA ordered rolling blackouts.

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They’ve since made some changes to their communication plan, in the event of another winter storm of that caliber.

“I cannot guarantee that nothing will happen,” McGowen said. “But I can guarantee that we’re much better prepared than we were last winter.”