By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 04, 2021
Dallas
After years of hooting at those loopy Californians for
the annual blackouts that roll through their state’s unicorn-based electric
system, it was Texans’ turn to sit in the dark. A winter storm of unusual but
not unprecedented intensity found the state unprepared in the worst way:
Several pieces of its electric network malfunctioned simultaneously just as
demand for power was soaring — the supply was cut when demand was at its peak.
The result was a lethal catastrophe that was very, very close to being much,
much worse than it was.
Before the lights were even back on in Del Rio, efforts
already were under way to do the first thing that must be done after Americans
lose their lives in dramatic circumstances: shoehorn the episode into one
preexisting political narrative or another.
The Left’s account of the Texas blackouts offers the same
simple-minded one-word explanation that progressives applied to the
subprime-mortgage crisis: deregulation. But electric deregulation in
Texas is mainly a matter of retail sales and prices. Though not directly
related to the recent failure, there are live questions about those: For
example, the state doesn’t know quite what to make of the situation of those
thousands of Texans who decided to start trading commodities derivatives in
their household budgets by opting for a monthly electric bill based on spot
prices in the wholesale market rather than for a predictable, long-term fixed
rate. Those consumers saved a bit of money for a long time, but some of them
are getting February electric bills for thousands of dollars, thanks to recent
wild fluctuations in the electricity market.
The entities born of deregulation are not what failed —
they are marketing-and-billing companies not very much involved in the actual
generation or delivery of electricity, which is why in Texas the company you
call to address a power failure often is not the company from which you get an
electric bill. An analogy: Electric deregulation might be thought of as giving
Texas consumers a choice between Uber and Lyft or old-fashioned yellow cabs —
none of which will get you where you are going if the roads are impassable, the
traffic lights are malfunctioning, and the gas stations are all closed.
Deregulation advocates often overpromise and underdeliver, and there is
certainly a case to be made that they have done so in Texas, where residential
electric rates are relatively high today — and higher now than they were before
deregulation.
But that is not what caused the lights to go out.
Neither are the Right’s favorite targets, windmills and
solar installations — at least not directly. Wind generation, which on a very
good day can supply about 60 percent of the electricity Texans use, fell to
almost nothing during the cold snap. Solar production fell off, too, as inches
of snow accumulated atop photovoltaic panels. That would have been a real
problem if the state had been counting on that power, but it wasn’t. Everybody
already knows that wind power is fickle and that it often goes offline during
ugly weather, and Texas wasn’t including it in its planning before the
blackout.
To the extent that alternative energy is part of the
story, it is that Texas’s “renewable portfolio standard” has mandated massive
investments in wind and solar, recruiting to the green crusade tremendous sums
of capital that might have been better directed into other projects, such as
subsidizing surplus capacity and adapting generation equipment to a wider range
of weather conditions. But even that is far from straightforward, because some
precautions that can be taken against extreme cold make it more difficult to
deal with extreme heat, which Texas already sees a lot of every year and can
expect to see more of. Professor Wei-jen Lee of the University of Texas at
Arlington, director of the university’s Energy Systems Research Center,
analogizes certain winterization efforts to putting on a winter coat that has
to be taken off in the summer. But unlike skiing attire, electric
infrastructure is not something you can slip into and out of.
And resources have to be prioritized: In the three worst
days of the storm, temperatures recorded at Dallas–Fort Worth Airport averaged
just under eleven degrees Fahrenheit. We can prepare equipment for ten-degree
days — but what about five-degree days? What if it gets colder than that? Some
parts of Texas saw temperatures drop below zero, and they were not the coldest
temperatures ever recorded in the state. Investing in far-flung, complex
preparations for that kind of rare arctic chill may not be the best use of
scarce resources. A better choice might be putting the money into unsexy,
old-fashioned projects such as building abundant fuel storage near electric
plants or expanding capacity so that unusual weather does not stress the system
so intensely. But these are complex problems, too: Generating capacity isn’t a
spare iPhone that can be quickly booted up whenever you need it and mothballed
when you don’t.
The locus of failure was not Texas’s famously independent
electric grid, which is not connected to neighboring grids in such a way as to
allow the easy importation of out-of-state power. Distribution was not the
critical failure in Texas — generation was. The problem with the grid
was that there was not enough power coming into it. But even if the Texas grid
had been connected to its neighbors, they were experiencing similar conditions
and had little or no excess power to sell, with some experiencing blackouts of
their own. The problem with Texas’s grid wasn’t inadequate distribution
infrastructure — it was that demand was threatening to overwhelm supply in such
a way and to such a degree as to cause massive, long-lasting damage to
equipment. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid
operator, says blackouts were imposed because the state was minutes, perhaps seconds,
away from an even more drastic catastrophe that could have interrupted the
supply of electricity for months. Unable to match supply to demand, the grid
operator reduced demand by cutting consumers off. But they were not able to
execute their plan for “rolling” blackouts — instead of being without juice for
45 minutes at a stretch, many Texans were in the dark for 45 hours or more.
Some of them died.
What actually went wrong in Texas is that much of the
equipment that businesses and quasi-public agencies were relying on to
counteract the unusual weather was not itself able to withstand that weather.
The failure was not limited to a single class of operations: Power plants went
offline, but so did gas producers and pipelines. Natural-gas wellheads and processing
equipment froze up; the water that comes up out of the ground with natural gas
turned into ice in connector pipes; some nuclear and coal power went offline
when safety sensors and other equipment malfunctioned in the low temperatures;
water pipes feeding steam systems and other facilities froze up. Electricity
plants had to reduce output because they were not getting natural gas and other
fuels, but much of the equipment used to deliver those fuels is itself
electric, meaning that the electricity plants were in effect cutting their own
fuel supplies when rolling blackouts were imposed.
The winter weather was worse than expected; the necessary
equipment fared worse than expected; the margin between adequate performance
and catastrophic failure was narrower than expected. It might be tempting to
call this a worst-case scenario, but there are worse cases that can be
imagined. Winter chills like this one are unusual in Texas but not unheard of;
years may pass between recurrences, but recurrence can and should be expected.
The problem is not a simple one, and the solutions will not be simple either.
But if there is an encouraging bit of simplicity to be
found, it is this: Ultimately, what happened in Texas is a matter of supply and
demand. Managing demand is difficult, because it means bullying consumers into
spending their money other than as they’d prefer. In the great battle between
insulated crawl spaces and marble countertops, Carrara always wins. As the
memory of the winter storm fades, people in Galveston are not going to be eager
to spend tens of thousands of dollars to weatherize their houses, which in 99
months out of 100 would save them only a few bucks on their utility bills. And
demand will climb even more steeply with the electrification of economic
sectors such as transportation: In the next 15 years, the number of miles
Americans drive in electric vehicles is expected to increase sevenfold,
according to electric-grid trade group WIRES, which also forecasts big
increases in demand for electricity in everything from home heating to data
farms. People who have to face voters every few years are going to have a tough
time making demand management work as a practical policy.
But we can add to the supply. Relatively low-emission
energy sources such as natural gas and nuclear power are not waiting on
groundbreaking new technologies or the restructuring of world energy markets —
they are ready to go, right now. Wind and solar are viable in some applications
and could play an important role in decentralizing the grid, making the overall
system less vulnerable. These are things we know how to do and can do at a
relatively low cost. If you are looking for a solution to what happened in
Texas, more is more.
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