(Natural News)—America’s power grid is at escalated risk of faltering due to the imminent major storms or prolonged cold snaps this coming winter, warned the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the regulator that monitors the electricity system.
As per NERC’s “2023–2024 Winter Reliability Assessment” published November 8, a sweeping portion of the country that extends from Texas to the Canadian border is not adequately equipped for tough winter conditions. The report indicated that the power grid continues to fray and suffer from underinvestment, despite promises by politicians and regulators to shore it up following deadly blackouts in recent years. “As observed in recent winter reliability events, over 20 percent of generating capacity has been forced offline when freezing temperatures extend over parts of North America that are not typically exposed to such conditions,” the report alerted. “When electricity supplies become constrained, [bulk power system] operators can face a simultaneous sharp increase in demand.”
In a call, NERC told reporters that the grid has traditionally faced its greatest challenges in the summer heat but a confluence of factors in recent years has led the grid to be equally unstable during severe winter weather. “We’ve seen the system become more vulnerable to winter conditions,” said John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment and performance analysis. “For decades, the system had been built and planned around summer peaks.” However, during summer this year, the non-profit also warned that two-thirds of the grid was actually at risk of experiencing summer outages during peak energy use. (Related: Warning: Two-thirds of the North American power grid is at an ELEVATED RISK of experiencing summer outages during peak demand.)
Back in February, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved new cold weather reliability standards for U.S. generators. NERC proposed the standards in response to Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which left almost 250 dead and made Texans face widespread blackouts. “Additional cold weather standards recently adopted by NERC’s Board have been filed for FERC approval,” Moura said in a statement. “This is a positive development in ensuring industry is prepared for extreme cold weather.”
Other issues NERC identified include the growing complexity of forecasting winter load and the curtailment of electricity transfers between reliability coordinators and balancing authorities. “While the curtailments alleviate an issue in one part of the system, curtailments can contribute to supply shortages or affect local transmission system operations in another area,” NERC said.
Meanwhile, as the grid continues to be unstable as winter season approaches, NERC warned Texas, – where voters earlier this week approved a plan to fund more power generation – to be at higher risk of energy shortages this year than last. This is because it is not bringing enough new power online to meet the state’s surging demand, and its existing infrastructure has not been adequately weatherized.
Similar challenges plague areas north of the Lone Star state, according to the report. The regional grid that serves 15 states from Arkansas to Wyoming will be operating with significantly lower backup energy reserves than last year. NERC warned that while the region has the resources it needs to make it through a normal winter, extreme cold weather could “result in shortfalls that can trigger energy emergencies.”
The authors warned that a winter storm of similar scale in the region could result in a repeat of the outages that disrupted last year’s holiday season for millions. The report also concluded that power grid operators are struggling to bring on new generation and weatherize equipment at the pace required to meet the challenges of increased demand and the more extreme and unpredictable weather patterns created by climate change. “This forecast again shows that our nation faces looming grid reliability challenges while electricity demand continues to soar,” said Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which represents 900 local electricity providers. “That’s unacceptable and should be cause for concern for all Americans.”
The looming grid disruption is due to neglect and not because of greenhouse gas emissions
According to Mark Spurr, legislative director at the International District Energy Association and president of engineering and consulting firm FVB Energy, a massive grid disruption is inevitable due to three trends that are “getting worse, not better.” He listed the increase in severe weather events due to climate change, rising peak electricity demand, and a growing dependence on natural gas.
“We’re thrilled to see NERC acknowledge what everyone already knows: failure of fossil-fueled power plants, especially gas-fired ones, during the winter, is the greatest threat to grid reliability today,” said Tom Rutigliano, senior advocate for the Sustainable FERC Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But he said that NERC’s focus on fuel supply risk “hides that the root cause is simply poor maintenance by power plant owners and the gas industry.” He further pointed out that grid operators must plan for the poor reliability gas plants have demonstrated time and again and hold non-performing plants accountable. “Congress should follow FERC’S recommendation to set reliability standards for the gas industry,” he added.
The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association reportedly warned the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) proposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-, gas- and oil-fired power plants could worsen the grid’s precarious situation. NERC’s reliability assessment showed that our “nation faces looming grid reliability challenges while electricity demand continues to soar,” Matheson said. EPA’s “unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable proposal will result in less electricity, more power outages and higher costs for American families and businesses.”
Visit PowerGrid.news for news related to America’s dwindling electric source.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
