The reasons for the power outage that has more than four million customers without power in Texas

In Texas and neighboring states start to discover that when it is very cold, it can be difficult to generate electricity. However, it is not impossible. Power plant operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway, and Siberia do this all the time.

What rocked Texas wasn’t an engineering glitch, or the frozen wind turbines that leading Republicans blame. This is a financial structure for the production of electricity that does not encourage power plant operators to prepare for winter. Critics say in the name of deregulation and free markets, Texas has created an electricity grid that emphasizes low prices over reliable service.

It’s a “Conception of the Far West market based solely on short-term prices”, he pointed Matt Breidert, portfolio manager of a company called TurtleEcofin, on appointment The Washington Post.

And yet the temporary crash of this market saw Monday and Tuesday how the wholesale price of electricity in Houston went from $ 22 per megawatt hour to around $ 9,000. During, 4 million homes in Texas are without electricity.

Utility company Griddy, which sells electricity at wholesale prices to retail customers without setting a price in advance, on Tuesday asked its customers to find another supplier so as not to be inundated with huge bills.

Widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap expose the failures of a state some consider the most neglected of America’s electricity infrastructure, a reflection of the chaos that hit California last summer.

Edward hirs, an energy researcher at the University of Houston, said that Divestment in power generation reminds you of the later years of the Soviet Union or of today’s oil industry in Venezuela: “They hate it when I say that,” he told the Washington Post.

The immediate problem facing the Texas power sector is whether your members are willing to pay for the type of common wintering measures further north, especially over a period of time that occurs once a decade.

The governor of Texas, the republican Greg Abbott, asked on a Tuesday reform of the State’s electricity network manager, the Texas Electrical Reliability Council (ERCOT, for its acronyms in English).

“Too many residents are without electricity and heat in their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and harsh winter conditions,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable”he added.

He assured that he will work with the legislature to find ways to ensure that the state “never experiences power outages like this again.”

The Republican Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, Dade Phelan, announced immediate hearings to find out “what went wrong”.

Fossil fuel groups and their Republican allies have accused frozen wind turbines of power cuts and warned of the suspected dangers of alternative energy sources. In fact, some turbines have frozen over, but in Greenland and other more advanced northern locations they can keep theirs through the winter.

However, the wind represents only 10% of the energy produced in Texas in winter, and the loss of energy on the grid caused by the shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those that rely on natural gas, eclipsed by a factor of five or six the deformation caused by frozen wind turbines.

When the cold hit, the demand for electricity exceeded the mark ERCOT had calculated to be the maximum needed. But at a time when the world is inundated with surplus natural gas, much of Texas wells, state power generation operators have not been able to convert this gas into electricity to meet this demand.

At very low temperatures, the pipes froze because there was moisture in the gas. The pumps slowed down, the diesel engines to power them could not be started and one plant after another was shut down. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear power plants went offline, hampered by frozen material.

“At a time when the need is greater than ever, it is a strain on the system like we have never seen before”, He said Tom seng, director of the School of Energy Economics, Policy and Trade at the University of Tulsa, according to the Washington Post.

I affirm that in the southwestern United States there was a gas rush as the sources were disconnected. He also said that most of the excess gas is stored underground, and bringing it to the surface becomes increasingly difficult at such prolonged low temperatures. March futures contracts for natural gas are sold at $ 3 per million BTUs in Oklahoma, but the spot price hit $ 600 during the weekend.

In Texas, natural gas production has fallen by millions of cubic meters per day since the start of the month, reported Anne Swedberg Robba, director of energy and gas analysis in the United States for S&P Global Platts. Nationally, production has been reduced by about one 14%.

“But this is not the first time that we have had this problem in Texas,” Hirs of the University of Houston said as quoted by the Washington Post.

Nail a severe cold snap occurred in the southwestern United States in 2011, and extremely low temperatures in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008 and 2010. A study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, on the wave of 2011, which also generated widespread blackouts for the same reasons, found that “The large number of generator failures that have been experienced raises the question of whether it would have been useful to increase reserve levels before the event”. “This action would have brought more units online sooner, could have avoided some of the freezing issues faced by generators, and could have exposed operational issues in time to implement fixes before units were needed to respond.” at the request of customers, ”the report says.

On Tuesday, the two agencies announced that they will now investigate the causes of this year’s failure.

Texas shares refusal to compensate production companies for maintenance with CaliforniaUnlike most of the rest of the country, Hirs said. He added that what happened to California in the heat of last summer is now reflected in the Texan winter.

“Texas and California have failed spectacularly this year”, he said. “There is a huge human cost. Many people have died in California and Texas “, he pointed out.

Texas is unique among the states in having its own network which is almost completely isolated from the rest of the country. This prevented him from importing much electricity due to the outage of his power plants, but Hirs said the cold was so prevalent in the heart of the country that no one had electricity anyway. save.

Bill Magness, executive director of ERCOT, said in an interview with the television channel WFAA in Dallas, who thought the state grid was better prepared for winter than before.

“In 2018 we had very cold winter days, but we found that the generation fleets were working very well,” he said. “I think we have made real progress in preparing for these winter periods. And this storm has been extraordinary. We see a lot of units getting dislodged for reasons that have to do with the weather, so without a doubt preparing for winter is something to constantly observe“, Did he declare.

Although temporary, one factor that may have hurt is that the suddenly high wholesale price of electricity prompted ERCOT computers to order companies to “Get rid of the load”, It is eliminate customers, rather than face rising costs.

The State Utilities Commission on Monday ordered ERCOT to allow the high prices. They almost certainly won’t last long, as temperatures are already rising. The cost of that electricity, at least in the short term, is likely to weigh more heavily on retail utilities.

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