BALTIMORE — A power plant outage in Maryland led to a brief disruption of service for about 4,000 homes in Howard County, highlighting growing concerns about the state's energy grid capacity amid increasing demand.
BGE and PJM acted quickly to restore the Brandon Shores power plant to operation after the shutdown.
Watch as residents are worried about their concerns with future outages
"The job of the power grid operator and generation power plant operator is not evaluated based on the occurrence of those events, but based on how they've been able to cope with it," said Yury Dvorkin, an energy reliability expert at Johns Hopkins University. "What happened yesterday is that they were able to bounce back fairly quickly. I think people working at BGE and PGM should be commended for that," he added.
With energy demand increasing at the fastest rate in decades in some areas, experts express concern about the long-term stability of the power grid.
"This kind of situation, they are likely to happen moving forward, and what really matters, what is really under our control, is to make sure that all utilities, all power grid operators and generation companies are well positioned to address these outages as quickly as BGE," Dvorkin said.
Some residents remain worried about future outages and feel they have limited options as consumers.
"We don't have much opportunity for an open market to sort of express our sort of feelings towards the company through our use of the dollar and so instead we have to sort of rely on what they give us and if they give us just a bunch of nonsense. We don't really have much to do except for just to sort of take it," said Emily Riker, a Mt. Vernon resident.
PJM, which oversees power grid reliability in Maryland and 13 other states, released a statement saying: "The local transmission system has stabilized, and we expect to be able to reliably serve the demand in the area."
Despite the quick resolution of this incident, concerns about the long-term balance of energy supply and demand in the region remain.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
