Weather as a Stress Test: Cold, Heat, and Correlated Demand
Weather doesn't attack the grid. It does something worse — it pushes demand and cripples supply at the same time, through the same cause. Deep cold makes everyone turn up the heat while it freezes the gas that the heat depends on. A heat wave makes everyone turn on cooling while it robs power plants of the cool water and cool air they need to run. The grid is fine in mild weather because mild weather lets it pretend its problems are separate. Extreme weather removes the pretense. Faraday's read: the climate isn't a load on the system. It's the correlation engine.
Knowledge check
During a severe cold event, why is it dangerous to assume that gas-fired generation and gas-heated homes are separate demands on the fuel supply?
Show the answer
Because they draw from the same pipeline network, and in most systems residential heating has delivery priority. When cold spikes heating demand, pipeline pressure and available gas fall precisely when power plants need more fuel to meet electric heating and general load. Freeze-offs at wellheads cut supply at the same moment. Generation and heating are not separate demands — they compete for one constrained resource under a single common cause.