Power outages cascade as big winter storm reaches US East Coast
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A snow removal machine working on the tarmac of LaGuardia airport in New York on Jan 25, 2026.
PHOTO: AFP
NEW YORK – A massive winter storm
Temperatures plunged on the storm’s eastward path.
Parts of Texas and the mid-south were coated in freezing rain – and a layer of ice thick enough to down power lines.
Up to 1.9cm of ice is expected to accumulate across Nashville and surrounding areas on the night of Jan 25.
Almost 933,000 homes and businesses across the US – the majority of them in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana – were without electricity at 12.36pm ET.
Air travel has all but ground to a halt in some cities.
The storm forced more than 16,000 cancellations from Jan 24 to Jan 26, according to data from FlightAware.
By 10am on Jan 25, with snow falling, more than 80 per cent of departures were cancelled at Newark Liberty International Airport, LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International Airport, based on data from aviation analytics company Cirium.
Cancellations at Washington’s Reagan airport topped 90 per cent.
New England may see up to 45.72cm of snow on Jan 26, according to the US Weather Prediction Centre, with up to a foot possible in New York City. Some of that snow may fall as sleet, potentially icing roads.
New York City officials announced that its approximately 500,000 public-school students would have remote instruction on Jan 26.
The Texas grid will face tight conditions on Jan 26 as demand continues to climb.
The US Energy Department ordered the state’s grid operator to use backup features at data centres in periods of extreme stress.
Electricity usage there will approach 76 gigawatts (GW) on the evening of Jan 25 and then top 84GW on the morning of Jan 26, which would be a winter record and close to the all-time high, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid’s operator. A traditional nuclear reactor has a capacity of 1GW.
Early on the morning of Jan 25, the Energy Department said it had issued an emergency order that authorises the biggest US grid – PJM Interconnection – to run resources regardless of limits established by environmental rules or state law.
The goal is to help the mid-Atlantic mitigate blackouts during the storm. PJM spans 13 states and includes Washington.
Wholesale electricity prices rose to about US$1,200 (S$1500) per megawatt-hour in Virginia, Maryland and Washington as at 10.30am. That was more than double the grid-wide price on PJM’s system.
Demand has surged in northern Virginia as data centres crowd the area, leaving that section of the grid particularly constrained.
Another grid, ISO New England, on Jan 25 issued a precautionary alert, citing the cold temperatures and snow in the forecast.
New England was generating 40 per cent of its electricity by burning oil as at 10.30am, as wholesale natural gas prices soared.
On Jan 24, the grid managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which stretches from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast, faced an energy shortage and a need to reduce demand.
Even as snow and sleet begin to taper off, the risk of power shortages or blackouts is set to increase in some places on Jan 26.
Snow and ice are unlikely to melt any time soon.
Temperatures are forecast to remain “bitterly cold”, forecaster Paul Ziegenfelder of the Weather Prediction Centre wrote on Jan 25, making travel difficult and likely causing power demand to remain stubbornly high for days.
The country’s natural gas system also faces a greater risk of equipment failures and wells freezing off, which in turn risks curtailing critical fuel supplies to generators.
Refiners and chemical plants on Texas’ Gulf Coast, meanwhile, shuttered units amid the deep freeze, according to filings. BLOOMBERG
