as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure.
Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote monitoring capability beyond whats detected at the line. Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid (again, due to older design considerations)
Now this part might get a little political, but these substations/transfer depots/etc... arent just old because the outage would hit a lot of customers at once, but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.
its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.
Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote monitoring capability beyond whats detected at the line. Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid (again, due to older design considerations)
Now this part might get a little political, but these substations/transfer depots/etc... arent just old because the outage would hit a lot of customers at once, but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.
its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.