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

If we’re talking about Texas particularly, a huge part of the problem is that utilities haven’t invested in winterizing their plants. If you take a look at what happened during the freeze last February, a huge amount of natural gas capacity was offline because it was too cold for the plants to operate.

Modern heat pumps are perfectly capable of operating at subzero temperatures. They’re a bit less efficient, but are plenty to keep a reasonably insulated house warm.