The cold snap we just went through was highly unusual. It’s rare in recent years for our temperatures to dip into the single digits, but it happened overnight on Tuesday and Wednesday (1/21/25 and 1/22/25). It seems that our increasingly unstable climate is causing weather to be more extreme, in this case apparently by destabilizing the “polar vortex” around the north pole and sending polar air in our direction.
The extreme cold has caused electricity demand to skyrocket, especially with more homes and businesses replacing their natural gas and propane heating with heat pumps. Our regional grid operator, PJM, reported a winter demand record on Wednesday.
Wednesday will probably set a winter record for Kendal-Crosslands (KCC) electrical demand too, as well as for the PJM grid. As most readers already know, KCC’s electrical usage is higher on cold winter mornings than on hot summer afternoons because of our use of electrical heat in independent living. So a winter record for us (if that’s what this is) is also an all-time record.
Given this background, it’s a good time to ask the question: will our Peak Alert program need to begin dealing with PJM winter peaks? When might that happen, and how might the program have to change?
What’s a Peak Alert? First, a refresher on our Peak Alert program. KCC pays a big surcharge on the electricity it uses when the regional electric grid, operated by PJM, experiences a peak. That occurs when summer temperatures are very high across the PJM region (from Chicago to New Jersey and south to Virginia) and air conditioning throughout the region turns on. These peaks usually happen around 5 p.m., and usually in July or August. We get a surcharge (which, in some years, can be up to a third of our electric bill) for our use during the five highest peaks of the summer.
In our Peak Alert program, we ask residents to reduce their use of electricity on afternoons that could be a PJM peak. Those alerts go out about a dozen times each summer and cover a period from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on specific days. We have saved KCC a lot of money with this program (probably upwards of $50,000) and we have helped avoid the use of the worst of the high-polluting generating plants that run only during peaks. More detail on the program is available here.
Winter peaks are coming—but are they here? Every year, PJM does a forecast of the expected summer and winter peak electricity demand for the PJM region. Both the summer and winter peaks have been growing, but the winter peaks have been growing faster, and it is clear that someday there will be winter days among the top five days that determine the surcharge.
The peak demand in the last few days seems to have caught PJM by surprise. Two weeks ago, PJM published its annual “Long-Term Load Forecast”. That document projected a peak this winter of 134,663 megawatts (MW) and a summer peak of 151,254 MW. However, the preliminary estimate for the demand this past Wednesday morning at 8:15 was approximately 145,000 MW, or about 108% of the forecasted winter peak, and only 4% below the forecasted summer peak. Clearly, winter peaks are starting to become really important—perhaps important enough to slip into the “top 5” peaks, and therefore, to impact the peak surcharge we pay.
Could Wednesday’s peak make the “top 5” for 2025? If the early estimate of 145,000 MW holds, Wednesday’s peak could easily be one of PJM’s top 5 peaks this year. As the chart below shows, it would not quite have matched any of last summer’s top 5 (the lowest of which was 147,519 MW). But it would have been in the top 5 if it had occurred in 2022 or 2023. In fact, if it had happened in 2023—a year with a mild summer—it would have been the highest of the year’s peaks.
We won’t know until next summer whether this week’s peak will be among 2025’s top 5, but that certainly is a possibility.
What are the implications for our Peak Alert program? If we are indeed entering a period in which the top 5 PJM peaks occur in a mix of winter and summer, our program will need some serious adjusting. PJM’s winter peaks happen on cold winter mornings around 8:00-9:00 a.m. when people are warming up their homes and offices and cooking breakfast, and the sun hasn’t risen enough to make a difference. The peaks almost always occur in January or February.
If our team starts looking out for winter peaks and spots a likely one coming, the actions it might request would look something like this:
- Preheat your cottage around 6-7 a.m., a little warmer than normal, then turn off the heat until 10:00. (Some experimentation will be needed to determine exactly how much warmer than normal will be needed, in order to stay comfortable.)
- Postpone cooking breakfast until 10:00 (or finish cooking it by 7:30).
- Don’t charge your car or scooter until 10:00
- Don’t take a shower or run your dishwasher or washing machine until 10:00.
A reminder: this is NOT primarily an exercise in saving electricity, but rather in shifting electricity use out of a specific two-hour period.
We will need to gather the team together to discuss in detail what having both winter and summer alerts would mean.
Fortunately, it looks like there will not be a similar period of intense cold for the rest of January. We’ll see what February brings. But hopefully, we are done with PJM peaks for this winter.
PS: How did we do last summer? We don’t yet have the data to say how successful last summer’s Peak Alert program was. PECO’s web site, from which we get our hour-by-hour usage data, is working only for some of our electrical accounts but not others. That has been the case at least since August. Without the hourly data, we don’t know what effect our peak alerts had last summer.
On the Kendal Journey 