The powerful winter storm that swept the mainland United States this week has blown Texas with Arctic temperatures causing widespread blackouts, plunging millions in darkness while snow and record cold paralyzed the country’s second largest state.
Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits opposed to the Biden government’s policy against clean energy took the opportunity to blame the Lone Star State’s fast-growing use of wind power on the outage.
But as the output of all electricity sources in Texas plummeted, frozen instruments at coal, nuclear and natural gas plants, coupled with limited natural gas supplies, were the main cause of the ongoing power outages. Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas told Bloomberg News Tuesday. (ERCOT is the state’s main grid operator.)
Energy analysts and electricity experts said the complete failure of plans for extreme weather scenarios created the kind of cascading disaster that threatens to occur more and more as climate chaos puts pressure on human systems.
Ironically, wind power was a ray of hope for grid operators, as its resource, which tends to ebb in the winter months, even surpassed last weekend’s daily production forecasts.
ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Transmission towers and power lines lead to a substation after a snowstorm on February 16, 2021 in Fort Worth, Texas.
“There is so much misinformation and ridiculous political spin targeting icy wind turbines when it is the portion of the stock that ERCOT planned most realistically,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston. “For the coldest day in winter, they expected only a small portion of the cake from wind and sun.”
In contrast, the grid operator planned to get about 90% of the electricity tax from what he calls “solid and reliable sources”, such as coal, natural gas and nuclear reactors, he said.
“It has been a failure that our ‘solid and reliable resources’ were not solid or reliable when we needed them the most,” Cohan said.
Of the roughly 70,000 megawatts of gas, coal and nuclear power plants, a whopping 30,000 megawatts have been offline since Sunday night, said Jesse Jenkins, an electricity expert at Princeton University.
“The main story remains the failure of thermal power plants – natural gas, coal and nuclear plants – which ERCOT is counting on to be there when needed,” Jenkins wrote in a statement. series of tweets on Tuesday evening. “They have failed.”
LM Otero / AP Customers use the light of a cell phone to peek into the meat section of a Dallas grocery store on Feb. 16. Although the store lost power, it was only open for cash sales.
To complicate matters, Texas homes are designed to keep temperatures about 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the air outside during sweltering summers, and not to hold the heat during freezing winters, said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the US. University of Texas at Austin’s Webber. Energy Group. Now that heat loss is contributing to the increasing demand on the grid.
“Everything in Texas is geared towards peak demand in the summer, when we all try to keep our homes air-conditioned and keep it 75 when it’s 105 outside,” Rhodes said. “We designed our houses for this 30 degree difference. But now our houses are trying to maintain a difference of 60 degrees, and they are not designed for it. It’s a losing battle. “
Under normal circumstances, grid operators and utilities in Texas plan for peak demand during the summer heat. During the winter, many factories are offline and supplies are shipped elsewhere until energy-hungry air conditioners and refrigeration systems push up demand for the grid around August. The blackouts now show that “demand forecasts were wrong, and far too low,” said electricity analyst Nick Steckler.
“It was a huge miss,” said Steckler, head of the US power unit at the BloombergNEF energy research firm, a company separate from the financial news service. “I cannot stress enough how much the available capacity exceeds the total expected demand.”
On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) called for an investigation into ERCOT’s preparations, declaring the matter a point of emergency in this legislative session to “ensure that Texans never experience power outages again on the scale they have seen. have seen the last few days. “
“The Texas Electric Reliability Council has been anything but reliable for the past 48 hours,” Abbott said in his statement. “Far too many Texans lack power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and harsh winter weather. This is unacceptable.”
It wasn’t just the grid operator and power plants to blame. Pipeline companies whose supply lines froze and even construction designers and construction practices limiting cold weather insulation made “Texas gas and electricity demand extremely sensitive to cold weather,” Jenkins said in a statement. his Twitter thread
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Pike Electric service trucks line up after the February 16 snowstorm in Fort Worth, Texas.
In that sense, the blackouts reflect another recent climate catastrophe Texans have faced. After years of concrete sprawl that continued to spread outward, Houston’s lack of climate planning made it vulnerable to catastrophic flooding when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017. At the time, Andrew Dessler, a climatologist and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told me. HuffPost that the storm offered “a taste of the future.”
It is still impossible to know whether this particular cold snap is related to climate change, and there is a lively debate about the extent to which Arctic warming is weakening stratospheric forces that normally confine icy temperatures to the northern latitudes of the United States. soil. In 2018, Marlene Kretschmer, scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, found that the periods of a weakened ‘polar vortex’ force had increased over the past four decades and corresponded to about 60% cold extremes in central Eurasia during the period. But researchers argued last year in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that there isn’t enough data to make any definitive claims about the link.
Much less rigorous ethics and fact-keeping are guiding what political opportunists are contributing to the discussion of what is happening in Texas.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) shared a 2014 image of a helicopter defrosting a wind turbine in Sweden calls it “a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources such as natural gas and coal”.
The other ends of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s media empire managed to project a unified message that also blamed icy turbines.
On the more prestigious newspaper, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal – a body whose willingness to bend facts for ideological purposes fought the ire of reporters in its newsroom – at what it called “ the paradox of the left-wing climate agenda: the more we fossil Using fuels the more we need them ”, in an opinion piece entitled“ A Deep Green Freeze ”.
On the populist television side, Fox News star Tucker Carlson focused on wind turbines in his Monday night monologue: “It all worked fine until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died. This is not to beat up the state of Texas – it’s actually a great state – but to give you an idea of what’s going to happen to you. “
Carlson did it his usual way, with the kind of confusing political misinformation that the public can now rely on after disasters.
“There always seem to be stories that are very far from reality,” Cohan said. “Gaslight is a good word for it.”
Sara Boboltz contributed to the reporting.
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