U.S. energy regulators asked lawmakers November 7 to help maintain natural gas supplies during bouts of extreme cold weather after the issue was highlighted by power outages caused by Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022.

According to Reuters, a report on the joint inquiry from the North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC) and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said that Winter Strom Elliott was the fifth winter event to take place over the last 11 years that threatened national electrical grids with outages.

During its peak, Winter Storm Elliott caused roughly 90,500 megawatts (MW) of electric generation to go offline. Utility companies in the southeast were also forced to cut off a supply of over 5,400 MW of electricity to customers.

"We narrowly dodged a crisis last year [2022],” said NERC president and CEO Jim Robb. “Had the weather not warmed up on Christmas Day, it is highly likely that natural gas service would have been disrupted to New York City.”

The report recommended completing cold weather reliability standard revisions enacted during Winter Strom Uri in 2021. The NERC and FERC also requested that Congress and state lawmakers establish reliability rules for natural gas infrastructure. Lastly, regulators suggested better enforcement of standards, a technical review of power outages and improved communications between grid operators and gas distributors.

"Someone must have authority to establish and enforce gas reliability standards," said FERC chairman Willie Phillips.