(The Epoch Times)—As winter approaches, concerns about the reliability of the electric grid in the southern United States have been raised, especially after the rolling blackouts experienced last year.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (NERC’s) 2023–2024 Winter Reliability Assessment (WRA) released earlier this month provides a comprehensive view of the potential challenges and readiness of the bulk power system (BPS) for the upcoming winter season.
This assessment is a crucial tool for informing industry leaders, planners, operators, and regulatory bodies about the potential risks and necessary actions to ensure reliable power supply during the winter months.
“This forecast again shows that our nation faces looming grid reliability challenges while demand for electricity continues to soar,” NERC CEO and former U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson said in a press release. “That’s unacceptable and should be cause for concern for all Americans. To avoid catastrophe, policymakers must recognize their role in threatening the reliability of the grid and take steps to help prevent rolling blackouts before it’s too late.”
Focus on the South
One of the key findings of the WRA is the risk of insufficient electricity supplies during peak winter conditions.
A significant portion of the North American BPS, including areas in the southern United States, is at risk because of prolonged cold snaps that can lead to high generator outages and increased demand, particularly from electric heating systems, according to the report.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator region, which has seen an increase in available resources through new wind and natural-gas-fired generation, remains vulnerable to extreme cold-weather events, particularly in its southern areas.
These events can cause high generator outages due to inadequate weatherization or insufficient natural gas fuel supplies, such as was seen during outages in 2022 just before Christmas.
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Similarly, the regions covered by PJM Interconnection, SERC-East, and SERC-Central are also at risk of energy emergencies during severe cold-weather events.
Despite having adequate resources for normal winter conditions, these regions’ generators are susceptible to decreases in capacity and outages under extreme conditions.
The assessment also highlighted the critical role of generator fuel supplies, particularly natural gas, in ensuring winter electricity demand is met.
The interconnected nature of the natural gas and electric systems means that disruptions in one can have significant effects on the other.
This was notably observed during Winter Storm Elliott, when natural gas production declines led to wide-area electricity and natural gas shortages.
Last Winter
Winter Storm Elliott, which struck in December 2022, was a “once-in-a-generation storm” that brought unprecedented challenges in particular to southern portions of the country serviced by federal energy utility the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
The storm affected most of the eastern continental United States, bringing heavy snowfall, high winds, and freezing rain, causing widespread travel disruptions and power outages.
The TVA, anticipating the storm, had developed a mid-term forecast and shared it with various teams to complete cold-weather readiness actions and winter readiness certification processes, according to a post-event report the agency released in May.
Despite these preparations, the storm’s speed, its intensity, and the resulting conditions exceeded the TVA’s forecasts and efforts.
The TVA system experienced its coldest average temperature since February 1996, with lows in major cities such as Nashville and Memphis dropping to 1 degree F. Energy demand surged, resulting in the highest 24-hour electricity demand supplied in the TVA’s history on Dec. 23, 2022, according to the report.
The TVA team worked to increase generation and meet the soaring demand. This involved dispatching units that weren’t previously in service and executing day-ahead, real-time, and emergency purchases.
Despite these efforts, the TVA faced significant challenges. Of its 232 generating units, 38 were negatively affected, mostly because instrumentation froze. This resulted in the TVA’s nuclear and hydro assets, which weren’t affected by the extreme weather, playing a crucial role in supporting energy demand during the event.
The severity and scale of Winter Storm Elliott led to decreased availability of TVA-owned and contracted electricity supply and decreases in imported electricity from neighboring markets. To maintain grid stability, the TVA was forced to implement emergency procedures, directing local power companies to reduce power demand, resulting in localized interruptions. This was the first time in the TVA’s 90-year history that such measures had to be taken.
NERC Recommendations
NERC states that coal, another vital fuel for electricity generation in winter, also faces challenges. Although generator owners report fewer coal supply issues than they had last winter, there are concerns about coal transportation, particularly in areas affected by drought conditions that could restrict coal availability and affect generator output, according to the report.
Another area of concern is the growing complexity in load forecasting during winter, the report says. The electrification of the heating sector and the increase in variable solar power resources add to the unpredictability of electricity demand, making it challenging to accurately forecast and plan for peak demand conditions.
Recommendations by the agency include reviewing seasonal operating plans, implementing cold-weather preparations, monitoring fuel supplies, and being prepared for potential reserve deficiencies.
Additionally, regulators are encouraged to support grid operators with environmental and transportation waivers and public appeals for energy conservation.
Events such as winter storms Uri in 2021 and Elliott in 2022 have underscored the need for improved cold-weather preparedness and coordination between generator owners and operators and BPS operators, the agency added.
The assessment stresses the importance of planning and coordination to address the various challenges that could affect the reliability of the electric grid in the southern United States during the winter to keep customers warm.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.