Why Texas's Power Grid Still Hasn't Been Fixed
On Wednesday, I woke up, in Marfa, to steely skies and tension in the back of my skull, a sign that the pressure was dropping and a cold front was moving in. Not that I needed to be reminded: the winter storm was all that anyone could talk about at the bank, at the post office, at the unusually busy liquor store. It would be the most significant statewide cold snap since Winter Storm Uri, last February, which overwhelmed the electrical grid and left millions of Texans without power for days. “I can guarantee the lights will stay on,” Governor Greg Abbott had told an Austin television station in November; now he was backpedalling, saying that “no one can guarantee” that rolling blackouts wouldn’t be necessary. On Twitter, where “PTSD” was trending in Texas, people tweeted images of long lines and empty shelves at HEB grocery stores. This time, thankfully, the grid held up—not, however, because of any substantive change taken by state lawmakers.
Last year’s disaster stemmed from a confluence of extreme weather and systemic weaknesses. On February 10th, a severe and prolonged cold front moved into Texas. Within days, temperatures had plummeted thirty to forty degrees below normal, and stayed below freezing in parts of the state for nearly a week. Many natural-gas facilities—the largest source of electricity in Texas—were inadequately winterized and began to fail as wells froze and equipment seized up. On the night of February 14th, as temperatures dipped and Texans cranked up their electric heaters, demand surged beyond the worst-case expectation of sixty-seven gigawatts, as estimated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s grid. The grid can typically generate around ninety gigawatts of power, but nearly half that capacity was inaccessible, owing in large part to the natural-gas failures. The disparity between supply and demand was extreme; to restore equilibrium, ercot ordered “load shed,” or intentional blackouts, for large swaths of the state.
In the end, nearly five million Texans lost power, many for several days. The state reported that two hundred and forty-six people died as a result of the storm. (Other sources say that this is drastically underreported.) Some died of hypothermia, and others died trying to keep warm—from running a gasoline-powered generator indoors; from setting a fire that seems to have escaped the fireplace and burned the house down. In the storm’s aftermath, we learned that, as bad as things got, they could have been far worse. The system was so thoroughly overwhelmed that we were minutes away from an automatic shutdown of the entire grid, which would have taken months to get back online.
In the aftermath, Governor Abbott blamed the grid failure on renewable energy. (He later walked this claim back.) But iced-over wind turbines weren’t the villain. Wind turbines supply a fraction of the grid’s winter power supply, much less than the similarly icebound natural-gas processors. Instead, blame rested with Texas’s unique energy structure, and its lax approach to regulation.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/why-texass-power-grid-still-hasnt-been-fixed
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