Bomb cyclone shows cracks in Washington’s electrical grid

SEATTLE – The bomb cyclone that knocked out power for some half a million people in Western Washington last week exposed the weaknesses in the Pacific Northwest’s energy grid.

As the massive low-pressure system spun off the coast, easterly winds, reaching hurricane strength in places, tore through the region, blowing over trees into power lines.

The storm in its wake left a massive problem for utilities: a slew of complex repairs to a grid perforated in thousands of places. For days, homes, schools, hospitals and businesses were left in the dark and cold.

In the aftermath, grid experts say the cyclone’s damage – and our struggle to bounce back – proves we’re in desperate need of significant upgrades as utilities rush to wean themselves off fossil fuels, add renewable power and the transmission lines to match. State law requires utilities to be carbon free by 2045.

The entire system needs an overhaul, experts say.

Utilities don’t just need more power and bigger transmission lines, they’re even short on electricians needed to make repairs and maintain the grid we already have.

Washington’s demand for electricity is skyrocketing. Hydropower has struggled with the warming atmosphere and utilities aren’t adding renewables and battery storage fast enough to replace closing fossil fuel plants.

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Nancy Hirsh, executive director of the Northwest Energy Coalition.

This particular storm likely wasn’t fueled by climate change, meteorologists say, but others will be. Heat domes and cold snaps, both exacerbated by climate change, drive up electricity demand, which could outpace supply in the years ahead.

These types of storm events used to hit maybe once every five years, Hirsh said. Now we can expect them multiple times a year, in multiple seasons.

Even in the short term, questions remain about whether utilities have the resources to bring power back quick enough or even whether they communicate effectively with emergency officials.

Long outages

The crux of the problem last week came from the direction of the bomb cyclone’s strong winds, which hit trees at a unique direction.

Nearly half a million customers lost power the night of Nov. 19, and by Friday morning more than 170,000 remained without electricity in King County alone.

Food spoiled quickly, not that many were able to cook it without electricity anyway, said Brendan McCluskey, King County’s emergency management director. Many homes sat without heat; though fortunately the weather wasn’t particularly cold, he said. And people had little or no access to critical information as the outages continue.

For some, the danger is even more acute. Across Washington nearly 53,000 people require electricity to stay alive, usually to keep their medical equipment functioning. For them, power outages become life-threatening situations.

At least two people died by falling trees during the storm. So far, state and local officials could not say whether the widespread outages – Seattle’s worst since 2006 – led to any deaths. They’ll be collecting more information over the days and weeks ahead. The widespread 2021 power outage in Texas, when more than 4.5 million homes lost power during a severe winter storm, contributed to at least 57 deaths.

By Wednesday morning McCluskey said his team worked to coordinate their efforts with cities, fire and water districts and utilities. Not only were many homes without power but so too were hospitals, landfills needed for debris cleanup, cell phone towers and radio networks. These places had to be prioritized for early power access, he said.

But one big partner was missing from these early conversations, he said: Puget Sound Energy.

Some phone calls to the state’s largest utility weren’t going through or emails weren’t returned, McCluskey said. The county didn’t establish consistent contact with the utility until Thursday morning, he said.

Hospitals had a similar issue with PSE, unable to find out accurate estimates of when their power would be back on, said Onora Lien, executive director of the Northwest Healthcare Response Network.

This continues a longstanding pattern of complaints about Puget Sound Energy’s response and lack of communication during past outages.

Representatives for PSE said the utility followed normal protocol for this storm, setting up incident command centers (one had to be relocated after losing cell service) and sending out situation reports twice daily. Communications Director Christina Donegan said utility officials did not attend the county’s coordination meeting Wednesday morning but they were available in other ways, working around the clock.

Outages for some customers were expected to drag into the weekend as crews continued their work.

In one sense, Seattle City Light was prepared for the storm, said Andy Strong, the utility’s environmental engineering and project delivery officer. Officials knew the winds were coming and had enough transformers, wooden utility poles and cabling on hand.

What the utility didn’t have, Strong said, were enough workers. City Light is operating at about three-quarters capacity for overhead crews, which are needed to fix lines downed by trees. It’s an industrywide shortage, he said, and the utility is actively recruiting new workers.

At the height of the storm City Light had about 117,000 customers without power and despite working with fewer crews, cut that number to fewer than 4,000 by Friday morning.

What can be done?

The grid needs more renewable energy, Hirsh said. The greater the mix of hydropower, wind, solar and other options in more places, the more resilient the system will be if one fails or falls short.

This process has been moving forward slowly, siting massive wind or solar farms can be challenging and building them is expensive. But utilities across the region are investing in new power sources.

This past week’s outages weren’t driven by power plants failing so much as a disconnection of power lines, though.

For that issue, localized battery storage projects could have helped maintain power for some houses and neighborhoods after the outages, Hirsh said.

Or a microgrid system, said Kerry Meade, executive director of Building Potential, formerly the Northwest Energy Efficiency Council. This would allow smaller groups of customers to disconnect their power from the broader grid and keep themselves powered.

In the years ahead, some talk about using batteries from electric vehicles to keep power on during these large outages, Hirsh added.

Of course, that approach would assume those electric vehicles were mostly charged when the power went down, which wasn’t the case for many drivers last week.

What’s needed is a large-scale disruption of the status quo, Meade said. And perhaps there’s a place for the private sector to innovate further and act as a catalyst because most large utilities “aren’t going to disrupt themselves.”

Some might argue that the recent outages are a reason to hold on to natural gas plants as a source of reliable and affordable electricity, but Meade said that logic is flawed.

This country sits on a precipice and now is not the time to turn back, Meade said. In the long run fossil fuels will only generate more – and worse – storms. Instead, we must continue electrifying our lives but at the same time rework our grid to make sure outages are as rare and as short as possible.