Cold Weather Related Power Plant Outages Sweep Across the Nation

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). The recent cold front that blew through the United States late last week was to blame for many outages that spread from coast to coast. Downed power lines and equipment failures are the culprits for most of these outages. Heavy ice and snow are the main factors that have caused these outages to occur. The weight of ice on a transmission line can bring it down and stop the flow of electricity that runs from generating stations to substations. Snow on the other hand can freeze equipment, which can cause a unit to trip offline.

On the West Coast, the Navajo Power Station, a 2,400-megawatt (MW) generating facility in Arizona, had an 800 MW unit that was forced offline due to heavy ice on the transmission line. Another unit at Navajo was de-rated to half-load due to an ID fan bearing malfunction. Weather conditions on Monday prevented maintenance workers from making necessary repairs on the de-rated unit. In the Midwest, the Clinton Nuclear Power Station was de-rated to half-load because of transmission line issues related to the cold weather and freezing temperatures that faced the region. Towards the east, the Paradise Power Station in Kentucky had a 1,170 MW unit trip offline with complications related to the winter exposure.

Generating facilities in the north are known to be better equipped than those in the south for winter storms, since temperatures are more extreme in the north during fall and winter months. Some northern power plants have more indoor units than those in the south so that temperatures will not have an effect on them. Heat tracing is used when the weather gets too cold and units are seemingly unstable. In colder climates, under 30 degrees, electrically or steam-traced piping will be used in turbines to prevent the unit from freezing.

The wintry climates are not expected to last long, but during these times, maintenance workers will go to a variety of methods like down-powering and cycling to keep forced outages to a minimum.

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