Fully understanding the details about what went wrong with the Texas power supply system won’t be possible for weeks, and will no doubt involve investigations from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and its private sector partner, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. But having covered the U.S. electric system as a specialized journalist for over 40 years, some thoughts have come to my mind.
In no particular order:
*What happened in Texas was not a “black swan” event (although black swans are common and quite beautiful in New Zealand). The Texas electric system, which has been purposely separated from the rest of the North American system, has long been weather challenged, both by frequent winter freezes and even more frequent summer heat waves.
Hannah Northey, an excellent and experienced energy journalist with E&E News, tweeted Wednesday, “A decade ago, I wrote about a cold snap that was supposed to be a “wake up call” for the southwestern states – FERC called for more gas storage & found coal/gas units were ill-prepared to handle the Arctic blast. A decade ago.”
Virginia lawyer David Masselli commented in an email, “I was in Dallas in January 2004 and it snowed while it was in the high 50’s back home.” He included a link to an excellent article looking back at some of the winter weather challenges that have faced Houston over decades. Retired news broadcaster Dan Rather commented on Twitter, “Apparently America can put a man on the moon but Texas can’t keep the lights on. Houston, we have a problem.”
*It’s about preparedness. There is no surprise to anyone in the power business that weather matters. Heat, cold, wind, snow, flood, all contain threats to the power system. Norway, Sweden, Alaska, Greenland, Canada all manage to keep power flowing despite nasty (and entirely predictable) winters. Cold causes lubricants to become viscous, water to freeze (often immobilizing utility coal piles). In some cases where there is inadequate gas pipeline capacity to serve both electric generation and residential heating (that’s you, New England), cold can devastate the power system because the heating load gets priority.
There is also a general looseness among the general media to use the term “grid” indiscriminately. More carefully, the power system consists of several major components, all of which must work closely together. There are generators, and their associated needs for fuel, cooling, and maintenance. Generating companies run those plants. In Texas the last few days, all of the generating technologies had failures. Gas deliveries lacked. Coal piles froze, wind turbines seized up, and so it goes. Then there are the switchgear and wires to get the electricity from the generating equipment to the high-voltage transmission system. In Texas, this is the job of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (more about ERCOT later). Finally there are the distribution wires and transformers to lower the voltage so customers can use it. That’s the job of retail distribution utilities.
*It’s not about ERCOT. For reasons that far predate the creation of ERCOT, Texas has had an electric system island. There is very limited ability to send power outside of the state or import it. That was created by greedy vertically-integrated utility monopolies. They generated the power, moved it around the state, and delivered it to captive customers, all overseen by regulators they owned. They wanted no competition. It is no wonder that the dominant company, Houston Lighting and Power, was widely derided as “Houston Looting and Plunder.” The Texas utilities at the time of World War 2 agreed to cooperate to create a state-wide transmission grid to move power around the Lone Star State more easily. That was known as the Texas Interconnected System. In 1970, TIS became part of the North American Electric Reliability Council, a voluntary U.S. and Canadian grid system. In 1995, under the direction of then Gov. George W. Bush, Texas broke up the power monopolies into wholesale generating companies and separate retail distribution companies, with ERCOT as an independent system operator.
ERCOT’s job is to keep the statewide system in constant balance as load changes over time. Power must be constantly held within narrow frequency levels or the entire statewide system can collapse. That is why ERCOT had to order rolling blackouts. But those are concepts and constraints that few understand and make ERCOT an easy scapegoat.
*Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is a shameless politician. Picking up on the value of scapegoating ERCOT, he has called for sacking the ERCOT leadership. Cheap, easy politics. He’s also a two-faced liar. In an interview with Dallas TV station WFAA, he said, “It’s frozen in the pipeline. It’s frozen at the rig. It’s frozen at the transmission line. The natural gas providers are incapable of providing the natural gas that feeds into the generators that send power to people’s residences there in the Dallas area.”
Then, shortly afterward, he went on Fox News for an interview with Sean Hannity, where he claimed that “our wind and our solar got shut down and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid and that thrust Texas in a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.” Abbott has apparently learned from his role model Donald Trump that facts are irrelevant.
*Former Texas Republican Governor and Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry is a dangerous dope. In a blog posting on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s website, Perry said, “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” So for Perry, death is preferrable to integrating the Texas high-voltage grid with the rest of the U.S. He also repeated the lie about wind outages being the major cause of the Texas power supply failure.
–Kennedy Maize