“Consumers’ conservation had a direct impact on our ability to meet everyone’s electricity needs and helped us manage a very tight power supply caused by the extreme cold across all 13 states,” PJM President and CEO Terry Boston said.
Vectren reported a few incidents of gas pressure drops because of heavy demand. Dayton Power & Light said at its peak the spell caused 11,000 outages due to high winds or because of motor vehicles that hit utility poles.
PJM said it broke the record for peak winter electricity use twice on Tuesday from the previous peak of 136,675 megawatts in 2007. A megawatt is enough to provide power for about 1,000 homes. Tuesday morning’s electricity use peaked at 138,000 megawatts and in the evening at 141,312 megawatts, PJM said.
“Conditions were challenging for the grid due to the extreme cold in the past two days, a number of generating plant outages as well as increased demand for electricity to meet consumers’ heating needs,” PJM said. “The generating plant outages were mostly related to the weather. Outages due to natural gas curtailments were a relatively small percentage of the total outages. Despite the challenges, PJM was able to meet demand without interruption.”
PJM Interconnection serves 61 million people in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.
PJM salso coordinates and directs the operation of the region’s transmission grid, which includes 62,556 miles of transmission lines.
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