America’s Ice Storm Battery Test Begins This Weekend

A massive winter storm looms this weekend, stretching from the desert Southwest to New England. Power grids are on high alert, mindful of the blackouts or near misses when similar conditions hit in recent years. How well they fare will be a test of the work done since to weatherize electricity supply — and a test of grid-stabilizing batteries. For the latter, this storm could be like an early Super Bowl ad.

It is nearly five years since the catastrophic winter storm known as Uri knocked out much of the grid in Texas, causing multiple fatalities and losses running into the tens of billions of dollars. Outages at natural gas-fired plants, part of a wider failure of the gas-electric system, represented one of the primary causes of those blackouts.