How can the Southern power grid handle months of blistering heat with everyone blasting air conditioners, but can’t handle two days below freezing?

Question

How can the Southern power grid handle months of blistering heat with everyone blasting air conditioners, but can’t handle two days below freezing?

In: 1150

Answer 1

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIE0mcOGnms&list=PLTZM4MrZKfW9MypfZKND911Jh8bsX4oAS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIE0mcOGnms&list=PLTZM4MrZKfW9MypfZKND911Jh8bsX4oAS)

This playlist for Practical Engineering has several good videos on the subject of grid craziness towards the end. TLDR the grid is super duper fragile, and little failures cascade quickly to big failures if not mitigated quickly.

Winter storms don’t just come with increased loads – they come with massive scale grid faults like ice forming on insulators shorting the wires out, weighing down the lines causing damage, or weighing down trees to rest on the lines causing shorts. All in all more things go worse than summer.