It would be a relief if the critics who blamed the frozen wind turbines for last week’s crippling power outages were right. If they had, it would be easy to see why people in the second most populous state of the US had to sleep in their cars and burn belongings to keep warm after the icy winter weather turned temperatures down to -18 ° C decrease. Unfortunately, early indications suggest the reasons are much more complicated.
True, the oil-rich state is a colossus of wind. Although Texas relies heavily on natural gas, it leads the US in wind power generation, and as early as 2017, it had enough installed wind capacity to make it the world’s sixth largest wind power if it was a country.
As a result, wind farms sometimes provide a large amount of electricity from Texans, usually in the windy spring season. Last May, wind contributed a record 59 percent to hourly power demand. But it’s a different story in winter, when less wind is expected and planned during peak times.
As this winter’s brutal freeze receded, some of the state’s wind turbines jammed before last week’s outage. But as the Arctic cold continued, other generators also went offline, including some of the natural gas plants that provided 46 percent of the power in Texas last year – twice the 23 percent of wind farms.
Grid operators had expected record demand as the cold blast approached, but they didn’t expect so many plants to collapse under the stress. A full investigation into what went wrong will take weeks, but it’s clear that wind farms weren’t the only problem. As a grid official said on Tuesday, “It appears that much of the generation that has gone offline today was mainly due to problems with the natural gas system.”
In addition, Texas is not called the Lone Star State for nothing. Unlike other states, it relies almost entirely on its own power grid. This had advantages, but also meant that it could not easily import electricity to meet shortages last week. Another weakness of the Texas electricity system is the lack of incentives for businesses to make the investments necessary to ensure that the energy infrastructure can withstand extreme weather.
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This is not a new problem. Federal regulators warned a decade ago, when another bitter cold front led to power outages, that the state’s power plants would struggle in a repeat episode. As some commentators have noted, wind farms run in much icier places than Texas, from Sweden to Minnesota. But “winterizing” them with cold weather kits can cost $ 150,000 per turbine.
In sultry Texas, ‘summering’ turbines and other electrical equipment to make sure they can withstand heat waves seems more obvious – underscoring another troubling aspect of last week’s power outage. Scientists have been warning for years that a changing climate would lead to more extreme and unpredictable weather. Texas has shown the dangers of underestimating the risks this poses to infrastructure.
Finally, it is clear that today’s energy systems have a very reliable property. Anytime power outages strike, some critics will immediately blame the renewables and the politicians they support.
When the lights went out in California last summer, Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas tweeted that the Democrat-led state “was now incapable of performing even the basic functions of civilization, such as reliable electricity.” The senator’s Twitter feed was quieter as his home state went dark. This is good. Politicizing something vital and basic like electricity never made sense. Texas has just delivered a masterclass on why it should end.
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