Over half the U.S. population lives in an area facing a high risk of power outages during peak winter conditions this year, U.S. regulators with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, said Wednesday.

In their newly published 2023-2024 Winter Reliability Assessment, regulators warned that residents living in regions spanning from Texas to New England will be vulnerable to insufficient power supplies during extreme cold this winter, a trend that is due in large part to inadequate generator weatherization and limitations to natural gas infrastructure, NERC officials said.

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“The confluence of both of those factors has year after year resulted in wide swaths of generators being unavailable for some of our most critical winter periods and hours where the system needs it the most,” John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment and performance analysis, told reporters Wednesday afternoon.

In fact, the number of people at risk for the 2023-2024 season is much higher than last winter, when NERC determined roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population was at risk for a winter energy emergency.

Regions considered to be at elevated risk of insufficient energy supplies during peak winter conditions include Texas, the Midwest, New England, and the South, NERC said.

While most regions are well-supplied to meet demand during normal weather conditions, the situation could change quickly in the event of another cold snap, such as Winter Storm Elliott in 2022 and Winter Storm Uri, the 2021 storm that left millions of Texans without power and killed more than 240 people.

Outages from both storms were largely due to the failure of natural gas generators to come online.

While natural gas-fired generation remains the prevalent source of dispatchable generation in most parts of the country, regulators said that production rapidly declines with the onset of extreme cold temperatures, contributing to wide-area electricity and natural gas shortages.

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While gas operators are taking steps to weatherize their conditions and help lower risks for the winter weather, NERC officials said their assessment is that it is “unlikely” that actions will be enough to reduce the risk down to an acceptable level.

“We’ve seen the bulk power system more vulnerable to winter conditions,” Moura said Wednesday. “That’s not because of the peak demand we are seeing, but mostly because of generator outages.”