DALLAS (AP) – The power outages that plague Texas in unusually Arctic temperatures expose weaknesses in a power system designed when the seasonal changes of the weather were more consistent and predictable – conditions most experts believe no longer exist.
Of course, this doesn’t just happen in Texas. Utilities from Minnesota to Mississippi have imposed ongoing power outages to relieve the strain on electrical grids that have come under high demand in recent days. And power outages have become a summer and fall ritual in California, partly to reduce the chance of deadly forest fires.
But the fact that more than 3 million refrigerated Texans have lost electricity in a state that prides itself on its energy independence underscores the seriousness of an increasingly common problem in the US.
WHAT HAPPENED IN TEXAS?
Falling temperatures caused Texans to turn their heaters up, including many inefficient electric ones. Demand peaked to levels that normally only occur on the hottest days of summer, when millions of air conditioners are running at full blast.
The state has a generation capacity of about 67,000 megawatts in the winter compared to a peak power of about 86,000 megawatts in the summer. The gap between winter and summer supplies reflects power plants that go offline for maintenance during months when demand is generally less and less energy comes from wind and solar energy sources.
But planning for this winter did not involve temperatures cold enough to freeze natural gas pipelines and prevent wind turbines from turning. According to the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s electrical grid, 46,000 megawatts of power was offline statewide on Wednesday – 28,000 from natural gas, coal, and nuclear power, and 18,000 from wind and solar.
“All of our power sources underperformed,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, tweeted“They are all vulnerable to extreme weather conditions and climate events in different ways. None of them were sufficiently weathered or prepared for a full realm of weather and conditions. “
The staggering imbalance between energy demand and supply in Texas also caused prices to skyrocket from about $ 20 per megawatt hour to $ 9,000 per megawatt hour in the free-wheeling electricity wholesale market.
That raised the question of whether some of the electricity generators buying in the wholesale market might have had a profit motive to stop buying natural gas and instead just shut down.
“We can’t speculate about people’s motivations that way,” said Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT. He added that he had been told by generators that they were doing everything they could to provide power.
WHY WAS THE STATE NOT PREPARED?
Gas-fired power plants and wind turbines can be protected from winter weather – it’s routinely done in colder, northern states. The problem arose in Texas after a 2011 freeze that also led to power plant outages and blackouts. A national group in the electrical industry has developed winterizing guidelines for operators to follow, but these are strictly voluntary and also require expensive investments in equipment and other necessary measures.
An ERCOT official, Dan Woodfin, said factory upgrades after 2011 had limited shutdowns during a similar cold snap in 2018, but this week’s weather was “more extreme.”
Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, rejected ERCOT’s claim that this week’s freeze was unpredictable.
“That’s bullshit,” he said. “Every eight to ten years we have really bad winters. This is no surprise. “
In California, regulators last week ordered the state’s three major utilities to increase their power supply and possibly make factory improvements to avoid a fresh supply shortage, such as that seen in California six months ago. and resulted in rolling blackouts that hit about 500,000 people for a few hours straight.
“A big difference is that the California leadership recognizes that climate change is happening, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Texas,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been studying more than 20 years of power supply problems.
WHY THE NEED FOR ROLLING BLACKOUTS?
Grid operators say rolling blackouts are a last resort when power demand overwhelms supply and threatens to cause a broader collapse of the entire energy system.
Usually, utilities darken certain blocks or zones before disconnecting power to another area than another. Often areas with hospitals, fire stations, water treatment plants and other important facilities are spared.
The rollout of the outage assumes that no neighborhood will be without power for an unfairly long time, but that wasn’t always the case in Texas this week. Some areas never lost power, while others were blacked out for 12 hours or more as the temperature dropped into the single digits.
WHEN DO THEY APPEAR?
Rolling blackouts are usually triggered when reserves drop below a certain level. In Texas, as in California last August, grid operators are telling utilities to reduce the load on the entire system, and it’s up to the utilities to decide how.
In Texas, grid operators and utilities knew about the bad weather forecast for at least a week this week. Last weekend, they made calls for energy savings, and ERCOT tweeted that residents should “unplug the beautiful new appliances you bought during the pandemic that you only used once”.
The lighthearted attempts at humor were lost to the residents, few of whom were told in advance when their homes would lose power. When the outage started, some utilities were unable to provide information about how long they would last.
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO REDUCE ROLLING BLACKOUTS?
Start with the obvious steps: When power companies or grid operators warn of problems, lower your thermostat and avoid using large appliances. Of course, those steps are sometimes easier said than done, especially during record-breaking temperatures.
As in other places, Texans may be more willing to adjust their thermostats a few more times if regulators imposed a system that required households to pay higher prices during periods of peak demand and lower rates at other times.
“People are now turning up their ovens because there is no financial incentive not to,” said Borenstein.
Experts also say more fundamental – and costly – changes need to be made. Generators must insulate pipelines and other equipment. Investments in electricity storage and distribution would help. Tighter building codes would insulate homes in places like Texas better from the cold.
Texas, which has a network largely disconnected from others to avoid federal regulation, may need to rethink its go-it-alone strategy. The state could come under pressure to require power generators to keep more power plants in reserve for times of peak demand, a step it has resisted so far.
“The system as we built it is not performing to the standards we would like to see,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. ‘We have to do better. If that means paying more for energy to have more reliability, then we’ll have to have that conversation. “
Koenig reported from Dallas, Liedtke reported from San Ramon, California. Paul Weber of the AP contributed to this story from Austin, Texas.