Thursday, March 4, 2021

What Caused the Texas Blackouts?

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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