One of the biggest projected winter storms in years is expected to move across more than 2,000 miles of the United States, affecting more than two dozen states. Forecasting points to 10 to 20 inches of snow dropping in areas from the Southwest to New England, while a significant ice storm is unfolding in parts of the Southern Plains, Mid-South, Appalachia, Southeast, and southern mid-Atlantic. The storm is projected to usher in record-breaking and long-lasting cold, with subzero temperatures forecast for around 120 million people across the country.
This winter, extreme cold temperatures—like this upcoming storm that’s projected to affect nearly two-thirds of Americans—will drive up already high home energy costs and threaten electricity grid infrastructure. Just this week, natural gas prices have jumped 25 percent in anticipation of the upcoming cold weather. Heating costs for the average U.S. household are projected to be up to $1,000 this winter.
Extreme cold threatens vulnerable energy infrastructure, putting Americans at risk and driving a spike in energy prices
Extreme cold events threaten aging electric grid infrastructure, interrupting electricity generation and increasing the need for heating.
Accumulating heavy ice can damage power lines and trees, leading to severe, widespread, and long-lasting power outages if it takes down power lines. And the frequency of weather-related outages is increasing: There were 97 percent more cold weather-related power outages from 2014 to 2023 compared with 2000 to 2009. Past winter storms have left hundreds of thousands of customers without power across the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and South on multiple days in a single week. A report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) anticipates the potential for electricity supply shortfalls this winter as extreme cold temperatures threaten both natural gas-based generation and fuel supplies.
Power outages from overloading the electric grid jeopardize the safety of communities across the country who are already facing higher utility bills. Households paid 9.6 percent more on average in 2025 than they did in 2024, outpacing both wage growth and overall inflation. Higher prices will further harm households already facing energy cost inequities. Nationally, about 1 in 4 households face a high energy burden, spending more than 6 percent of their income on energy bills.
Without adequate heating, cold weather can trigger a cascade of health harms, from hypothermia and frostbite to heart attacks and strokes. In the United States, cold-related deaths have more than doubled between 1999 to 2020—up 109 percent.
A diverse portfolio of clean energy resources is essential to improve the reliability and resiliency of the electric grid
The United States must invest in grid improvements to ensure reliability in the face of extreme temperature shocks. No single source of power is invulnerable to extreme weather. Even conventional fossil fuels have proven susceptible to winter weather. For example, when Winter Storm Uri struck the South in 2021, natural gas and coal power plants accounted for nearly three-fourths of the generating capacity that was knocked offline, whereas clean power from wind, nuclear, and solar accounted for roughly one-quarter of outages. In Oklahoma, a surge in the spot price of natural gas left the state to foot a $1.4 million bill in a single week—an amount that Oklahomans will be paying off for the next 25 years.
As CAP recently noted in a study of grid reliability, a diverse array of clean energy sources—including intermittent solar and wind, firm nuclear and geothermal, and battery storage and hydropower—is more reliably able to step up during extreme temperatures. Solar and wind have higher potential during both extreme heat and cold; battery storage helps meet peak demand when other resources are unavailable; and nuclear and geothermal are more resilient to outages during extreme temperatures. While none of these resources are immune to failures during extreme temperatures, policy decisions across the country to invest in a diverse mix of clean energy resources have demonstrated this strategy’s flexibility and ability to prevent outages during extreme temperatures, while simultaneously reducing emissions.
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Additionally, investments must be made to modernize the aging infrastructure of the electric grid to prevent disruption to energy supply and power outages. Much of the existing grid infrastructure was built 50 to 75 years ago and has lasted well beyond its intended lifespan. In order to ensure a more reliable distribution of electricity, the United States must invest in upgrades to existing grid infrastructure—particularly through the deployment of grid-enhancing technologies and the buildout of new transmission lines. Hardening grid infrastructure and expanding the capacity of the grid can increase resilience to extreme weather and natural disasters.
Case study: The “Great Texas Freeze”
In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri claimed 246 lives across 77 Texas counties. In Central Texas, six to nine consecutive days of freezing temperatures—more than 40 degrees Fahrenheit below normal in some areas—broke records for the longest freezing streak in state history. Nearly two-thirds of the storm-related deaths were caused by hypothermia. Others stemmed from traffic accidents, the worst carbon monoxide poisoning incident in recent U.S. history, and failures of medical equipment during power outages. The cold paralyzed communities and core services and is estimated to have cost between $80 and $130 billion.
During Winter Storm Uri, freezing temperatures interrupted power systems in multiple ways. Many natural gas production wellheads and gathering facilities froze. In this instance, the inability to withstand the extreme cold resulted in a 45 percent decline in production volumes. Power outages—exacerbated by frozen infrastructure and cascading failures across natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, and solar systems that had not been adequately winterized—left nearly 10 million people across Southern states without electricity, including 4.5 million Texas customers still without power days into the crisis.
Following the disastrous impacts of the 2021 storm, Texas invested in expanding its clean energy capacity by adding 23,114 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity, 8,343 MW of wind capacity, and thousands of MW of battery storage to the grid, which helped prevent power outages and meet peak electricity demand during a period of cold in January 2025.
Conclusion
Climate change can produce extreme and vastly different weather events in the same area almost back to back. Some scientific research even points to cold spells occurring more often in areas unaccustomed to and sometimes unprepared for severe cold, where the aging, fossil-fuel-dependent energy infrastructure is vulnerable to these extreme cold conditions.
As the country experiences cycles of harsh winter weather, upgrading the grid and diversifying with reliable, clean energy sources is as essential as ever to protect the American people from growing climate threats and the economic impacts of extreme temperatures.
The authors would like to thank Jessica Ordoñez-Lancet, Mariel Lutz, Kendra Hughes, Lucero Marquez, and Trevor Higgins for their contributions.