What Happens When Power Lines Outrun Pipelines?
Burcin Cakir Erdener Explains Why Natural Gas and Electric Grid Planning Must Work Together
This installment of the National Laboratory of the Rockies’ (NLR’s) Tell Me Something Grid series features Burcin Cakir Erdener, an industrial engineer and researcher in NLR’s Grid Planning and Analysis Center. Cakir Erdener explains how natural gas has the potential to provide flexibility to the power system, why the infrastructure that delivers natural gas matters, and how modeling the gas and electric systems together can lead to better planning decisions.
Natural gas supports more than one-third of all U.S. energy needs, including power generation and industrial and residential applications. It could also offer added flexibility because natural gas plants can ramp up production quickly to respond to changing grid conditions, complement other resources, and help keep electricity reliable and affordable.
On a cold winter morning, however, the furnace heating your home and a gas-fired power plant may rely on the same pipeline network. Moving large volumes of gas through that network requires planners and operators to manage pressure, available pipeline capacity, and the physical dynamics of gas flow. During periods of high demand, understanding those dynamics helps ensure natural gas supplies can be delivered where and when they are needed.
That tension between supply and delivery has interested me since I started my Ph.D. in 2007. I began studying natural gas and power system interdependencies at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, where our team stress-tested disruptions to Europe’s gas supply, such as a cutoff of Russian gas, and analyzed how to make the system resilient to those shocks. It was a new research area at the time, and some people questioned whether the work would lead anywhere. Today, the connection is harder to overlook.
For natural gas to support electricity generation, both a physical and a commercial chain have to work: gas must be produced and processed, transportation must be arranged, and the fuel must move through the pipeline network to the plant at the required pressure.
Power planning studies often represent natural gas as a regional price or assume a certain amount will be available. Although useful for many planning questions, these representations may not capture the physical infrastructure needed to deliver the fuel. The question is not only, “Do we have enough natural gas?” but also, “Can we move it to this place at this time?”
That last question is what we call “deliverability,” and it is central to my work here at NLR.
The Grid Depends on What Happens Inside the Pipeline
NLR researchers are capturing the complex physics of moving natural gas through pipelines using detailed models that simulate the hydraulics, including pressure and flow across transmission and distribution networks. This helps determine whether gas can reach end users at the required pressure and how conditions change over time.
This modeling can help identify where additional pipeline capacity, operational flexibility, storage, or other infrastructure could provide the greatest value. By understanding regional congestion and pressure constraints in advance, planners can make better use of existing infrastructure and identify where targeted investments might help support reliable and affordable energy delivery.
Major events have also highlighted the importance of closer coordination between the gas and electric systems. During Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, disruptions across natural gas production, fuel delivery, and power generation contributed to widespread outages in Texas. Since then, regulators, grid operators, and gas system operators have placed greater emphasis on coordination, improved planning, and understanding how the two systems perform together during periods of high demand. That shift toward joint planning is exactly what our research supports.
At NLR, our gas-grid interoperability research brings more of that real-world system into planning models. We are integrating a natural gas system representation into the Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS™) model, the lab’s long-term power sector capacity expansion model, through our Fuels and Industry Integrated Optimization model, which simulates U.S. industrial and fuel-supply sectors. When we compared ReEDS alone with the connected models, we found that representing natural gas supply and pipeline infrastructure can change where gas-fired generation is most economical to build and how the broader energy system develops. Stated simply, the value of gas generation depends not only on the resource itself, but also on the infrastructure that delivers it. Joint planning allows us to adapt investments across both systems and identify where natural gas infrastructure and flexible generation can provide the greatest value.
This kind of result matters to the people who plan the grid. When a planner is deciding whether to build a new gas plant or to build a battery storage facility in a specific location, our models can show how local gas infrastructure affects the value and operation of that investment. Two locations that look similar from the power system perspective may look very different once the gas infrastructure is considered.
Two Systems Operating on Different Clocks
The gas and electric systems move at very different speeds. The electric system can respond within seconds, whereas significant changes in gas flows and pressures may unfold over minutes, hours, or even longer periods. A change in pressure or flow at one point in a pipeline may take time to propagate through the network. Pipeline “linepack”—the gas stored under pressure inside a pipeline—provides short-term flexibility, allowing operators to temporarily respond to changes in demand before additional gas moves through the network.
The gas and electric systems are also scheduled differently. Gas transportation is typically arranged through nomination and scheduling cycles. This setup can limit how quickly planned deliveries are adjusted as conditions change. A plant may discover that it needs more natural gas, but the system may already be operating according to an previously planned schedule. The power system, meanwhile, can be adjusted without interruption as conditions change throughout the day. There is also a contractual side. Many power plants do not pay for guaranteed, or “firm,” pipeline service because it can be expensive for a plant that runs only during periods of high demand. Instead, they may rely on “interruptible” service. During periods when pipeline capacity is constrained, the natural gas service to interruptible customers, including some power plants, may be curtailed before that of customers holding firm transportation contracts. Better coordination between natural gas and electric system operators, improved forecasting, and appropriate contracting arrangements can help planners account for this risk before periods of high demand occur.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been working to improve coordination between the two timelines, and continued coordination will become even more important as new large loads connect to the grid.
Future of Gas-Grid Planning
As we look forward, NLR researchers are working to make our gas-grid modeling more detailed and useful to organizations making infrastructure decisions. Next, we’re expanding the coupled model to the regional scale and incorporating seasonal demand and linepack to better capture the time lag between disruptions in the natural gas system and their effects on the power grid.
One important opportunity for advancing this work is improving access to more detailed natural gas system data. Compared with that of the electric system, information about natural gas infrastructure and operations is less widely available. We have a national representation of interstate pipelines but much less information about state and local distribution systems. Closer collaboration with utilities, pipeline operators, and system operators could help us test assumptions and understand regional constraints more accurately.
Future research will also need to examine the broader supply chain and lead times needed to support new natural-gas-fired power plants, which is already a discussion topic in this industry.
Acting as a bridge between natural gas and power experts is one of my favorite parts of this work. The two fields use different tools and speak different languages, even though their systems depend on each other. Connecting the natural gas and grid perspectives allows planners to make decisions and investments that work in real time and in the real world.
Learn more about NLR’s grid modernization and energy systems analysis research, including its gas-grid interoperability research. And read other articles from the Tell Me Something Grid series.
Last Updated April 28, 2026