Papers
“Building a Reliable, Robust Power Grid for Present and Future Energy Needs,” |
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Background and Introduction
The United States power grid has experienced an increasingly number of unplanned outages in the last decade. These outages appear to be becoming more significant in recent years. Unplanned outages have occurred in 2011, 2014, 2021 and 2022. The Winter Storm Uri, for example in 2021, in Texas and the South-Central U.S., saw the largest controlled load shedding event in U.S. history, up to that time, with over 20,000 MW of load shed in the Texas ERCOT system alone.
In this event, over 4.5 Million people lost power, some lasting as long as 12 days. It was estimated that over two hundred lives were lost. The costs to the Texas economy was estimated to be between $80 to $130 Billion.