As the snow flies and temperatures plummet, regulatory agencies and analysts alike warn that residents in multiple states are at an elevated risk of dangerous winter blackouts.
Areas like Texas, the Great Lakes region, New England, and North Carolina, are in the highest risk category, according to a report from the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).
In the same analysis, the agency concluded that a “large portion” of the U.S. power grid is at risk of insufficient electricity supplies during peak winter conditions.
Though climate change advocates claim severe weather events are the primary culprit, energy insiders say tight fuel supplies and an outdated electric grid play a critical role in potential blackouts.
Conservative estimates this year put the cost of critical power grid and infrastructure upgrades at $4 trillion with the use of supplemental nuclear power. Without nuclear energy, the price tag bumps up another $500 million dollars.
The administration of President Joe Biden approved a $13 billion stopgap measure to “modernize and expand” the power grid on Nov. 18. However, members of the energy community say it will take months or years for U.S. residents to see the difference.
Falling Behind
“There is a significant gap to upgrade aging grid infrastructure to meet net zero mandates and maintain reliability, and we are running out of time,” analyst Kim Getgen told The Epoch Times.
Getgen is the CEO and founder of Innovation Force, which tackles complex issues like America’s energy crisis. She says Biden’s infrastructure investment is a good start, but it’s exactly that, just a start.
“Upgrading aging infrastructure, system hardening, and resilience measures while complying with the evolving set of new cyber and physical security threats will require even more investment,” Getgen assessed.
She added that the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2021 Infrastructure Report Card gave the U.S. power grid a C- grade.
Getgen maintains a greater level of investment is needed, saying, “we can’t maintain the millions of miles of distribution and transmission lines that deliver the power, and we can’t harness the potential of renewable clean power.”
And though upgrades are crucial, some energy specialists say the U.S. electrical grid won’t become efficient overnight. Or even by next winter.
“It’s important to remember that something as complex as the electricity grid takes time to change,” director of energy studies at the University of Florida, Ted Kury, told The Epoch Times.
Working in the university’s Public Utility Research Center, Kury says the regulatory process for new utility projects moves slowly, no matter how much money is thrown at it.
“It’s a process with numerous safeguards, but that also means it takes more time. It’s reasonable to think that we’ll start seeing impacts in the next few years,” he explained.
Senior consultant in risk management at Customized Energy Solutions, Eric Hendrick, agreed with Kury’s assessment.
“Given the politics involved in any legislation, it’ll take some time before any of these funds trickle down to the states that need the funds,” Hendrick told The Epoch Times.
During a press statement, the director of reliability assessment for NERC, John Moura, explained there are “more areas at risk” of blackouts this winter amid power generation and fuel supply challenges.
The U.S. Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, also noted in a November brief that 70 percent of the nation’s power grid is more than 25 years old.
Grid upgrades aside, strained natural gas and coal supplies are also, quite literally, fueling higher power outage risks.
Fuel Factor
Not only are millions of Americans facing a greater risk of losing power this winter, they’ll also be paying higher energy bills.
Homes that run on natural gas can expect to pay 28 percent more. For those using heating oil, a 27 percent price spike is expected, and a 10 percent increase is likely for households that rely on electricity alone for heat.
This is due to a combination of higher market prices and demand, according to an Energy Information Administration analysis.
And with the continued push toward Biden’s net zero energy goals, an additional 11,778 megawatts of coal generation was retired in 2022. Meanwhile, the demand burden has shifted heavily onto natural gas, which is already suffering supply issues.
“This problem will be difficult to address in the short term … keep in mind gas storage is currently 89 BCF below last year’s level and 86 BCF below the
five-year average,” Hendrick said.
He added that low levels of natural gas storage and a lack of transportation infrastructure in the northeastern United States would likely create “volatile scenarios” with just 10 to 12 days of colder than normal weather.
Nevertheless, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission predicts a 24 percent increase in net natural gas exports for the 2022-2023 withdrawal season.
And then there’s the coal conundrum. With fewer generating facilities and sporadic supply chain disruptions in 2022, NERC asserts that coal has “limited stocks and resupply uncertainty” this winter.
Kury says 2021 saw a spike in coal consumption for electrical power. This year has seen an overall decrease in demand, but it doesn’t shore up with diminished reserves.
“It’s still impacting coal stockpiles at power plants,” Kury said.
“When you also consider that coal is delivered by rail, and rail transportation has been impacted by labor disputes, it reinforces the need to get more fuel to power plants.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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.
