(WHNT) — After thousands of people in North Alabama and across the region experienced rolling blackouts during a historic winter storm in December, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced a plan outlining how they plan to avoid that situation again.
On December 23, 2022, Winter Storm Elliot caused the highest winter peak electricity demand in TVA history and the most energy delivered over a 24-hour period. TVA asked its over 150 local power companies to reduce their load between 5% to 10% in order to maintain grid stability.
While that did successfully stabilize the power grid, it left thousands dealing with outages on December 23 and 24. The TVA accepted responsibility and admitted they fell short. Teams were then assembled to, “conduct a deep dive into what happened [and] how TVA responded.”
According to an executive summary released by the TVA, some of the recommendations that the team delivered were:
- Adjusting design standards to increase the resilience of generating facilities to withstand extreme events
- Leverage data analytics to better incorporate risk and uncertainty in usage and energy markets
- Updating emergency protocols and communication methods to improve awareness and information sharing
After reviewing the recommendations, the TVA outlined 12 steps as part of its commitment to provide, “energy security by building the energy system of the future” while still emphasizing clean energy.
Some of those steps include:
- Investing $3 Billion through 2027 to modernize its system
- Providing incentives and savings to businesses to suspend energy demand when supply is constrained
- Partnering with local power companies and customers to deploy distributed energy generation, energy efficiency and demand response
- Replacing aging, less reliable capacity with flexible and diverse capacity
- Innovating and developing new clean energy technologies
You can read the full executive summary here.
Huntsville Utilities CEO Wes Kelley says the company is working to ensure the electrical needs for North Alabamians are being met.
“With the future improvements that we will make I have no doubt about our ability to meet whatever responsibilities we have to meet to keep our regional grid stable,” Kelley told News 19.
