Why a powerful winter storm caused power outages in Texas

The powerful winter storm that hit the continental United States this week blew up Texas with arctic temperatures that triggered widespread power outages, plunging millions of people into darkness as snow and cold record crippled the country’s second largest state.

Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits opposed to the Biden administration’s clean energy policies have jumped at the chance to blame the Lone Star state’s growing use of wind power for the outages.

But as production from all sources of electricity plunged in Texas, frozen instruments at coal, nuclear and natural gas power plants, coupled with a limited supply of natural gas, were the main cause of the blackouts. of current, Dan Woodfin, senior director of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. (ERCOT is the state’s main network operator.)

Energy analysts and electricity experts have said a complete failure in planning for extreme weather scenarios is behind the type of cascading disaster that is likely to become more common as the chaos climate increases the pressure on human systems.

Ironically, wind power has been a bright spot for grid operators, as the resource, which tends to decline during the winter months, actually exceeded daily production forecasts over the past weekend.

ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

“There is so much misinformation and ridiculous political drifts that focus on icy wind turbines when this is the part of the procurement that ERCOT has most realistically predicted,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston. “For the coldest day of winter, they were only expecting a small slice of the wind and solar pie.”

In contrast, the grid operator planned to derive around 90% of the electrical load from what it calls “firm and reliable resources” such as coal, natural gas and nuclear reactors, he said. .

“The fact that our ‘strong and reliable resources’ have not been firm or reliable when we need them most has been a failure,” Cohan said.

Of about 70,000 megawatts of gas, coal and nuclear power plants, up to 30,000 megawatts have been offline as of Sunday evening, said Jesse Jenkins, an electrical expert at Princeton University.

“The main story remains the failure of thermal power plants – natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants – that ERCOT relies on to be there when needed,” Jenkins wrote in a series of tweets Tuesday evening. “They failed.”

Under normal conditions, Texas grid operators and utilities forecast peak demand during the summer heat. During the winter, many factories remain offline and supplies are shipped elsewhere until energy-hungry air conditioners and refrigerators cause demand on the grid to increase around August. The power outages now show that “demand forecasts were wrong, and they were way too low,” electrical analyst Nick Steckler said.

“It was a huge dud,” said Steckler, who heads the US power unit of energy research firm BloombergNEF, which is a separate company from the Financial Newswire. “I cannot stress how much less available capacity is than the total forecast demand.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (right) on Tuesday called for an inquiry into the ERCOT’s preparations, declaring the issue an emergency item in this legislative session to “ensure Texans don’t suffer anymore no power cuts of the magnitude they have seen in recent days. “

“The Texas Electrical Reliability Council has been anything but reliable for the past 48 hours,” Abbott said in its statement. “Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and harsh winter conditions. This is unacceptable.”

It wasn’t just the grid operator and the power plants at fault. Pipeline utilities whose supply lines have frozen and even building designers and construction practices that limit cold-weather insulation have made “demand for gas and electricity in Texas extremely sensitive to the events of. cold weather, ”Jenkins said in his Twitter feed.

In that sense, the power outages echo another recent climate catastrophe that Texans have faced. After years of sprawl of concrete spreading increasingly outward, Houston’s lack of climate planning left it vulnerable to catastrophic flooding when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017. At the time , Andrew Dessler, climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, told HuffPost that the storm offered “a taste of the future.”

It is not yet clear whether this particular cold snap is linked to climate change, and there is a heated debate over how warming the Arctic is weakening the forces in the stratosphere that normally keep freezing temperatures confined to latitudes. north of Earth. In 2018, Marlene Kretschmer, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, found that the periods of weakening of the force of the “polar vortex” had increased over the past four decades and that these corresponded to about 60% of cold extremes in the mid-latitude part of Eurasia during the period. But researchers argued last year in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that there wasn’t enough data to make definitive claims on the link.

Much less strict ethics and factuality guide what political opportunists contribute to the discussion of what’s going on in Texas.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) sharing a 2014 image of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine in Sweden, calling it “a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources like natural gas and coal”.

The opposite ends of the media empire of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch have succeeded in projecting a unified message also blaming the icy turbines.

On the side of the most prestigious newspapers, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal – an organization whose willingness to bend facts for ideological ends has drawn the ire of journalists in its newsroom – criticized what it called “The paradox of the left climate agenda: the less we use fossil fuels, the more we need”, in an opinion piece titled “A Deep Green Freeze”.

On the populist television side of things, Fox News star Tucker Carlson focused on wind turbines in his Monday night monologue: “Everything was working fine until one day it was cold outside. Windmills have failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and the people of Texas are dead. This is not to flout the state of Texas – it’s a great state, actually – but to give you an idea of ​​what’s going to happen to you.

Carlson delivered in his usual fashion, providing the kind of puzzling political disinformation that the public can now count on in subsequent disasters.

“There always seem to be stories that are far removed from reality,” Cohan said. “Gaslight is a good word for it.”

Sara Boboltz contributed reporting.