Jonathon Monken explains in The National Interest how extreme weather exposes grid risks and why interregional transmission strengthens U.S. security.
What’s Clear. The hidden costs of grid disruptions are not fully captured by outage statistics and utility bills; they also manifest as threats to our national security. The electricity grid is the foundation of American security, economic prosperity, and community resilience.
- Transmission Is the Difference Between Price Stability and Crisis. Winter Storm Fern showed that insufficient transmission can turn extreme weather into a price crisis. Like past storms such as Uri and Elliott, the core problem was not a lack of generation, but the failure to move electricity where it was urgently needed.
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Grid Reliability Is a National Security Imperative. Over 98 percent of the nation’s domestic military installations rely on the bulk power system. During Uri, 12 of 15 critical military installations in the state of Texas lost power, along with over 4.5 million people. Stronger interregional transmission could have prevented much of the damage, saving billions of dollars while keeping electricity flowing to families, businesses, and defense facilities.
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The Case for Interregional Transmission Is Financial and Strategic. First, Interregional transmission improves reliability, making it far more likely that customers’ lights and heating stay on during dangerous conditions. Second, it lowers costs, immediately during emergencies and over the long term as overall electricity demand continues to grow. These benefits combine to address the energy security risks that affect the United States from the home front to the battlefield, and time is of the essence.
How It Started. “This is a come to Jesus moment for a lot of market operators and planners. It’s like, ‘Wow, everything we had available is not enough,’” said Jonathon Monken. “It’s one of those examples of how you need to build a grid that’s bigger than the weather.”