PJM Interconnection

When it matters most

sbradford — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:39:47 +0000

When it matters most

March 1, 2026

When severe winter weather recently swept across Ohio and much of the eastern United States, it put significant strain on the electric grid. As temperatures dropped, electricity demand surged and fuel systems tightened. It was a challenging period that once again showed what truly matters during extreme cold: a reliable, diverse power supply that performs under pressure.

Within our 13-state region of the grid, known as the PJM Interconnection, coal, nuclear, and natural gas resources did exactly what they were built to do: keep power flowing when conditions are at their worst. Together, they supplied more than 90% of the electricity used during the coldest of those days.

The fleet of generation resources that powers Ohio’s electric cooperatives stood strong as well. All three coal-fired units at our Cardinal Plant remained online, as did all 11 Ohio Valley Electric Corporation coal units. Natural gas plants owned by cooperative members stayed online as well, despite extremely high gas prices and heavy strain on the natural gas delivery system. That balanced mix of resources helped maintain reliability across PJM and avoided potential power shortages during some of the most extreme conditions we’ve seen in quite some time.

One of the key lessons from that weather event was the importance of readily available fuel. Coal and nuclear plants store fuel on-site, which protects against sudden price spikes and fuel delivery interruptions. We saw what a difference that made when natural gas supplies became tight and prices rose sharply. While natural gas plants owned by Ohio cooperatives do maintain limited on-site backup fuel, it’s typically only enough for a few days of operation. Coal and nuclear plants, meanwhile, store enough fuel to run for weeks or even months at a time. That’s a real safeguard that helps manage both reliability risks and spiking costs, providing a critical buffer during the prolonged severe weather.

None of that reliability happens by accident, or without people. The operations, scheduling, and dispatch teams at our coal and natural gas plants worked around the clock, in difficult conditions, to secure fuel supplies, manage pipeline flows, and monitor rapidly changing grid conditions to keep those units operating safely and reliably.

Their dedication and expertise helped keep the lights on and homes heated when Ohio families needed it most.

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PJM Interconnection

Cardinal Power Plant

Ohio Valley Electric corporation

The road ahead

sbradford — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 20:00:55 +0000

The road ahead

January 1, 2024

Pat O'Loughlin

Up Front

January is always a good time to take stock of things — to prepare for what’s ahead in the coming year — and often, your electric cooperative finds a long list of upcoming events and things to consider as we try to make sure we’re ready for whatever comes our way. Our list seems to be a little shorter this year, but that doesn’t mean we have less to do or less to worry about. We have some important long-term goals that we need to make progress on to ensure that we can continue to provide the reliable and affordable electric service that you’ve come to expect.

One of our most pressing concerns is the growing recognition throughout the electric utility industry, especially among those whose job it is to ensure the reliability of the regional and national electric system, that we have entered a new era — a period of increasing risk that our electric system may not be able to provide all the power needed to keep everyone’s lights on during periods of extreme weather.

The nation’s growing demand for electricity is on a collision course with the shrinking supply of the traditional fossil-fuel-fired generation that has always been the foundation for the system’s reliability. Recent reports, prepared separately and independently by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and our regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection, point to government policy as the greatest threat to the future reliability of our electric power system. So that’s where we start our “to do” list for the coming year:

Emphasize to our elected officials and other policymakers the need to protect the interests of the people and businesses we serve, who depend on an uninterrupted supply of electricity for their safety, security, and economic well-being, regardless of the weather.
Adequately plan, invest, and maintain our electric generation facilities to maximize their availability during extreme weather events — when they’re needed most.
Plan for future investments in proven technologies that can keep up with the growing demand for continuous electric service, recognizing that all forms of electric supply have inherent strengths, weaknesses, and risks and that a diverse portfolio of resources provides more stability, in both price and availability, for everyone.
Provide training and workforce development opportunities to ensure that our employees are prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

We know there are challenges ahead, but one thing has remained constant over the years: We are always more successful when we work together toward our common goals, even when the path ahead is sometimes unclear.

Thank you for your patronage and support of your electric cooperative again this past year. I hope that you and your family enjoyed a joyous holiday season, and I wish you a safe and happy 2024!

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Electric highway

sbradford — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:53:12 +0000

Electric highway

May 1, 2023

Jeff McCallister

Power Lines

Again in late March and early April, a series of powerful storms swept through Ohio — this time bringing gale-force winds that brought down trees, snapped utility poles, and pulled wide stretches of power line to the ground, causing electricity to stop flowing to homes and businesses around the state.

Line crews from Ohio electric cooperatives, as they do, worked diligently, for long hours and several days, to reconnect those co-op-served portions of the power grid that had gone offline.

Scenes like that, when they happen, are highly visible events; that visibility may even make them seem common, especially during storm season. In reality, however, power is available to electric meters served by Ohio electric cooperatives more than 99.9% of the time, according to Ben Wilson, director of power delivery engineering at Buckeye Power, which generates and supplies the electricity co-ops distribute to their members.

For the vast majority of time, no one really thinks about electricity or where it comes from, or how it gets to that lightbulb. It’s only during that fraction of a percent of the hours in a year when power is not available that the grid comes to public attention.

But what is ‘the grid’?

In the United States, the electricity industry has a generating capacity of 1.1 million megawatts, serving up electricity to nearly every home and business — including over a million Ohioans and 42 million people across the country who are served by electric cooperatives.

“In short, the electricity grid is the system and equipment required to get electric power from where it’s generated to where it’s used,” says Tom Schmidt, principal planning engineer at Buckeye Power. “It’s a vast, sprawling, yet interconnected network that has provided this essential public good for over 100 years.”

It’s that interconnectedness that makes it a grid.

“You can think of the power grid like our system of roadways,” Schmidt says. “Each individual part of each system is designed and built to handle a certain volume — cars and trucks on the highway system, electricity on the grid.”

In that analogy, the interstate highway system compares to the high-voltage transmission system that carries bulk electricity at a very high voltage from its generation source to individual distribution systems.

Transformers step down voltage along the way, like cars taking exit ramps from the highway onto city streets, then slowing further onto smaller roads until it’s just one single car turning onto a driveway: electricity entering a home at a much lower, safer voltage than what’s carried on the transmission lines.

A system of redundancy

In the same way that there may be several different routes your family could take to drive to, say, Columbus, in case an accident or traffic jam closes one roadway, engineers build redundancy into the system of power lines and substations that provides numerous pathways for electricity to move and eventually arrive at members’ homes and businesses.

Generally, those redundancies are what allow for the grid’s overall high reliability. When an accident happens on the grid’s interstate — the extra-high-voltage transmission system — power is automatically rerouted to prevent interruptions to hundreds of thousands of consumers.

Lower-voltage transmission lines provide power to fewer people and can often lack the redundancy of the extra-high-voltage transmission system. This is also true for local distribution lines operated by electric cooperatives. In cases with limited redundancy, electric cooperatives constantly strive to maintain and improve local distribution lines while also supporting investments in transmission line upgrades — all, of course, while responding to every outage as it happens.

Like highway construction projects, transmission power line improvements can be slow, unsightly, and costly. But once completed, these investments strengthen the transmission grid by adding redundancy — increasing reliability and resilience for many decades.

Balance of power

Thomas Edison created the first power grid in 1882 and other than a change from direct current to alternating current, the technology is basically the same because the physics is the same: Power producers must ensure that the amount of electricity generated at power plants and put into the grid precisely matches the amount of electricity used by consumers at any given moment. An imbalance can cause anything from widespread blackouts to damaged equipment.

The recent retirement of numerous power plants over the last couple of years, coupled with extreme weather events, has resulted in blackouts from supply shortages in Texas, California, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky. With the removal of significant amounts of baseload generation, such as that provided by coal-fired power plants, from the grid, less-dependable sources of electricity were unable to keep up with consumers’ demand.

Rolling blackouts are currently necessary to avert a larger-scale grid catastrophe; notably, in Texas in February 2021, at least 246 people died during Winter Storm Uri and the resulting supply shortage.

New and emerging technologies continue to optimize grid performance, effectiveness, and reliability. Most of Ohio’s electric cooperatives, for example, continually modernize their distribution systems using “smart grid” technology: controls, computers, automation, telecommunication, and smart meters that work together to dynamically respond to quickly changing conditions.

“The grid is greater than 99.9% reliable, and we are always working to put more nines after that decimal,” Wilson says. “All outages hurt, even when they are rare.”

The electric roadway

The electricity grid can be compared with our system of roads.

Extra-high-voltage transmission lines, 300 kV (300,000 volts) to 1,000 kV: compares to an interstate highway (high volume, high capacity); carries enough power for 100,000 to 500,000 homes.

Transmission lines, 100 kV to 300 kV: compares to a U.S. highway (not quite the capacity of an interstate); 10,000 to 100,000 homes.

Sub-transmission lines, 20kV to 100 kV: closer to a state highway (still lots of volume); 1,000 to 10,000 homes.

3-phase distribution, 4 kV to 40 kV: more like a city street in terms of volume; 100 to 1,000 homes.

Single-phase distribution, 2 kV to 15 kV: more like a smaller residential street; 10 to 100 homes.

Distribution service, 120 to 240 volts: the lines that come from the street to your house, compares to your driveway; 1 to 10 homes.

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Time for a change

sbradford — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 17:40:35 +0000

Time for a change

May 1, 2023

Pat O'Loughlin

Up Front

After working in the electric utility business for nearly 40 years, I still marvel at the working of our interconnected electric power network that we commonly refer to as “the grid.” It has taken equal parts of engineering, ingenuity, and hard work to design, build, and sustain a network that makes electricity available every hour of every day, no matter how hot or how cold the weather outside may be. I hope you have the chance to read more about the basic workings of the power grid in our article on page 4 of the magazine.

Unfortunately, as summer approaches this year, we can no longer take that 24/7 availability for granted. Over the past several years, we have experienced a tightening of the supply-demand balance that’s critical to the function of our power grid. Since 2020, each time a large area of the country has experienced extreme temperatures for more than a day or two, the supply of electricity has proved inadequate to meet demand and forced regional grid operators to shut off power to consumers for hours or even days at a time to keep the system from crashing.

Across the country, we are facing the disorderly retirement of baseload coal and nuclear power plants because of poorly conceived and harmful energy policies that include:

Overreaching and unreasonable environmental regulations that result in unnecessarily high costs while providing only minimal environmental benefits.
Poorly designed electricity market rules that under-compensate reliable baseload power plants that provide a steady and controllable output, while over-compensating less reliable and intermittent sources.
Unreasonable goals and time frames to achieve greater reductions in carbon emissions from electricity providers, despite the fact that the U.S. electric sector has cut CO2 emissions by 36% since 2005 while producing nearly 5% more electricity.

Organizations charged with ensuring a reliable electric grid such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the PJM Interconnection have each, independently, published reports that outline concerning trends that are resulting in increased reliability risks.

While the mission of your electric cooperative has not changed and our commitment to you, our members, has not wavered, the harsh reality is that providing a safe, reliable, affordable, and environmentally responsible supply of electricity is getting more and more challenging. We need changes in the policies that affect our electricity supply.

Tags

PJM Interconnection

reliability

power availability