The U.S. Department of Energy issued a power grid emergency order on Sunday covering 17 states and giving the Southwest Power Pool permission to bring backup generators online as extreme heat pushes electricity demand toward near-record levels. Montana and Wyoming are among the states under the order.
The move matters now because the heat wave is turning a regional grid into a test of how much extra power can be tapped before outages begin. The Southwest Power Pool manages the grid across much of the central U.S., and the order is meant to give it room to act before conditions reach a more severe threshold.
Brandon Wittman said a Level 3 Energy Emergency Alert is the point where curtailing starts to become a serious consideration, and he said the grid would not need heat alone to tip into outages or rolling blackouts. A Level 3 Energy Emergency Alert is the final step before that kind of action, which is used to prevent a larger grid failure. Wittman said the power manager would not turn off electricity across the entire region at once, but would target the areas where load shedding would do the most good.
That approach helps explain why Montana is included even though temperatures there are expected to stay cooler than in some of the other states at risk. Parts of Montana served by cooperatives like Yellowstone Valley Electric Cooperative sit inside the Southwest Power Pool grid area, so the emergency order can reach customers there if the system comes under more strain than planned.
Wittman said the first places to be cut back would likely be the big industrial loads, including the Billings area refineries, because that is where shedding load pays off most. He also said the danger is tied less to one hot day than to a long stretch of heat that does not let equipment cool down and recover overnight. The difference this time is duration, not just temperature.
MTN reached out to Phillips 66 for comment about possible operations during a rolling blackout, and the company declined to comment. The next step depends on how long the heat lingers and how hard it presses the grid, but the order gives the Southwest Power Pool a faster route to adding backup generators before it is forced to consider rolling blackouts to protect the system.
