This week’s disaster in Texas left more than 4 million people in the dark and cold, and even more without clean water, when a rare burst of arctic air drove the temperature down, freezing natural gas plants and wind turbines.
Texas “planned more for heat waves than ice storms,” said Dan Reicher, who worked in the Clinton administration’s energy department on renewable energy and now works at Stanford University. And it is now figuring out how to avoid a repeat – a tricky situation given the independence of the Texas network and the sharp opposition from Republicans there to liaising with other states and allowing federal regulators to oversee their system of power. .
So far, the Biden administration has shown little sign of pushing its agenda to Texas, which is already leading the nation in wind power. But Congress is watching hearings to look at this week’s power cuts, which are likely to put the spotlight on the state grid.
How much and to what extent does the Biden government want to dig into this from a broader federal perspective? And that remains to be seen, ”said Reicher.
While scientists have not definitively linked climate change to the polar vortex that caused temperatures to drop this week, evidence is beginning to show that years of rising temperatures in the Arctic may play a role in changing the path of the jet stream that fed the icy cold . winds to the southern states.
“The way I think about it is you open the door to the freezer,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University.
And while climate scientist Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University said the link to climate change has not been resolved, there is no denying that climate change is fueling more “tail risk” events once thought to be rare. And both Texas and California, which suffered both a devastating heat wave and record fires last year, pose important questions for protecting critical infrastructure in a warmer world.
“It’s sort of an insurance issue,” Dessler said. “How much do you pay for insurance and take the chance that you’ll never take advantage of it, instead of having no insurance and then getting wiped out?”
California has been experiencing the effects of climate change on its grid for years – bushfires threatening transmission have increased in size and duration, heatwaves have increased in intensity and duration, and droughts in the Northwest are limiting crucial hydropower supplies. In response to growing liabilities from wildfire damages that caused the utility company Pacific Gas & Electric Company to go out of business in 2019, state utilities have increasingly shut down transmission lines during wind storms to reduce the likelihood of a spark.
In an effort to reduce carbon emissions and generate more energy in the state, California has set aggressive renewable energy targets, increasing the amount of solar capacity on its grid in the past decade to 27 gigawatts by 2019, more than a third of the country’s solar energy. output, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. And to balance its grid, it helped build an 11-state energy market that allows it to export surplus solar energy during the day and draw electricity from other sources after sunset.
But August’s unplanned power outages – the first state since the 2000-2001 energy crisis – underscored other weaknesses in California’s power grid. An analysis of the state of the outages that cut power for 490,000 customers for two hours one night and 320,000 customers the next night for less, blamed the historic West-wide heat wave, which saw demand increase and amount of power that California could limit importing from other states. But it also pointed to the high share of renewables in the state, which see their electricity production drop sharply as the sun sets, forcing other power plants to start up quickly – and they couldn’t do that that week.
Like California, Texas was suffering from a power shortage at a key time: In an hour early Monday morning, 30 gigawatts of generation – a quarter of the state’s total capacity – fell off the grid, just as a freezer drove up demand levels usually only in summer be seen. That led to several days of blackouts that affected 4.4 million customers in Texas.
Texas’ problems may stem in part from open market rules that differ from markets in other regions of the country, many of which require a “capacity market” where power producers commit to keeping their plants available for years to come. When the cold snap swept across the state, slowing shipments of natural gas and icy wind turbines, several power plants that could have helped fill the state were offline for maintenance.
And the state also ignored warnings from a report of a similar freeze in 2011, calling for insulating generators to protect against the cold – a costly solution, but one that could have reduced outages.
Experts say increasing connections across the country that allow power to be moved over long distances can help prevent future power outages.
Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said both Texas and California could benefit from more coordination with their neighbors – and Biden can help.
“There is a shared dilemma between our situations, and it is related to how we should account for the extreme weather events associated with climate change,” he said. “In both situations, the real world outperformed the planned extreme case by a wide margin.”
Texas has resisted that strategy, and by refusing to cross state lines, the state has kept federal regulators away from its power grid. That leaves it alone when resources fail to meet demand – as they have almost done several times in recent years when the summer heat pushed the system to its limits.
“There is a lot of finger blaming right now by Texas politicians, but there are some very painful lessons for them in terms of how their market is managed,” said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Energy. Renewable Technologies. . “One of the weaknesses of Texas is that they are not very well connected to other parts of the country.”
While the immediate focus is on restoring power to the state, some have begun to look ahead to how the net can prepare for the future.
“The only common element of the situation in California and what seems to be the case in Texas is the weather,” Richard Glick, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told reporters Thursday. “All the experts tell us that this kind of wild unexpected weather will be much more common than has happened in the past. It’s up to us and others to make the net more resistant to those particular extreme weather events.”
Glick questioned whether Texas should continue its go-it-alone approach, noting that nearby states with access to generation through transmission lines managed to recover from the freezer more quickly, including much of the upper midwest and even El Paso and Lubbock, Texas, which operate outside of the Texas primary network. That Midwestern power grid is operated by grid operators connected to the rest of the country and faced rolling blackouts Monday and Tuesday but largely recovered Wednesday.
Power grid experts have been calling for decades for a massive construction of transmission lines to ensure that the energy supply problems facing California and Texas can be alleviated by replacing the supply of downed power plants with electricity from other parts from the country, or even from Canada and Mexico. That’s an approach the Biden administration will likely try to take, but they will have to figure out a way to generate the billions or trillions in expenditures needed and figure out how to solve the bureaucratic problems that have led the process for decades. have slowed down. .
“The problem is not that transmission providers are looking for handouts,” said Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, an association of transmission manufacturers. “If the transmission [needs are] identified and put into a transmission plan, we will build it. Two real areas that are a stumbling block to getting more transmission infrastructure built: one is admission and location, the other is cost allocation. Who pays for it. “
Green groups generally agree that more transmission is needed – connecting rural areas with lots of sun and wind to population centers will be key to decarbonising the power grid – but they don’t think that more wires will be the end of it. will be process. Instead, they point to new technologies, such as developing “microgrids” that rely less on remote power supplies and rolling out batteries that can store power for when needed.
“First and foremost, we must recognize that we probably cannot prevent every such outage that we are likely to see in the next 30 years,” said Mark Dyson, a director for clean energy electrical power. think tank Rocky Mount Institute. “ It is far beyond the time to recognize a fundamental vulnerability of the energy system and take advantage of where we are today with digital technologies, more distributed technology, storage and flexibility and to tackle the root cause and not to play with these large-scale systems. “
Republicans are unlikely to embrace an infrastructure bill fraught with green energy incentives like Biden’s plans. But some conservatives argue that the bill could do a lot to make the energy grid more resilient to weather conditions.
“It looks like an infrastructure law will be set in motion and will include power supplies,” said former FERC Republican Commissioner Bernard McNamee, now a partner at the McGuire Woods law firm.
“I don’t think this will be a simple solution. It will be hard work, a lot of thinking by smart people to come up with practical solutions,” he added.