NERC, WEC warn of elevated winter reliability risks for Pacific Northwest

NERC and the Western Electricity Coordinating Council presented a sobering view of winter resource adequacy: deterministic and probabilistic modeling shows the Northwest could face reserve or energy shortfalls in extreme cold conditions when gas, wind and hydro availability all decline. Jared Freeman, a senior engineer on NERC’s reliability assessment team, said the region’s elevated-risk designation reflects the low‑resource deterministic scenarios the agency ran.

“The natural gas degrades in the study were varied from 15% to 25–35% … and all scenarios in natural gas derates showed a little bit of unserved energy,” Matt Zapataki, a senior reliability assessments engineer at WEC, told the commission. Jared Freeman added, “what we see is that multiple regions are facing elevated risks of reserve or energy shortfalls.” The presenters said Alberta and the Northwest carried the lion’s share of unserved energy in the more severe derate scenarios.

NERC’s assessment combines an hour‑by‑hour probabilistic energy evaluation with a deterministic peak‑hour capacity analysis. Freeman said the Winter Reliability Assessment examines both a 50th‑percentile (typical) and 90th‑percentile (extreme) demand hour and that resource availability is examined at the 50th and 10th percentiles to capture outage and derate risk. The report will be published publicly before winter. WEC said members are already performing winterization drills, simulating extreme cold scenarios and increasing cross‑sector coordination to limit derates at wellheads and in storage facilities.