The strong power of the winter storm that flew into the continental United States this week tossed Texas with arctic temperatures that triggered widespread disruptions, throwing millions into the dark, while record snow and cold paralyzed the second largest state. of the country.
Republican lawmakers and right-wing experts who opposed the Biden administration’s clean energy policies had the opportunity to blame Lone Star State’s growing use of wind energy.
But as production from all power sources sank in Texas, frozen instruments at coal, nuclear and gas plants, along with a limited supply of natural gas, were the main cause of outages, Dan Woodfin, senior director for the Texas Electric Reliability Council, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday. (ERCOT is the main network operator of the state.)
Energy analysts and electricity experts say the complete failure to plan for extreme weather scenarios has caused the kind of cascading disaster that risks becoming more frequent as climate chaos increases the pressure on human systems.
Ironically, wind energy was a bright spot for grid operators, as the resource, which tends to decline in the winter months, actually exceeded daily production forecasts last weekend.
ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Transmission towers and power lines lead to a station after a snowstorm on February 16, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas.
“There is so much misinformation and a ridiculous political upheaval that focuses on frozen wind turbines when this is the supply piece that ERCOT has planned for the most realistic,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University of Houston. “For the coldest winter day, they expected to receive a small portion of the pie from the wind and solarium.”
In contrast, the network operator planned to get about 90 percent of the electricity charge from what it calls “firm and reliable resources,” such as coal, natural gas and nuclear reactors, he said.
“It was a failure that ‘our firm and reliable resources’ were not firm or reliable when we needed them most,” Cohan said.
From about 70,000 megawatts of gas, coal and nuclear power plants, up to 30,000 megawatts has been offline since Sunday night, said Jesse Jenkins, an electricity expert at Princeton University.
“The main story continues to be the failure of thermal power plants – natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants – on which ERCOT relies to be there when needed,” Jenkins wrote in a series of tweets Tuesday night. “They failed.”
LM Otero / AP Customers use light from a cell phone to search the meat section of a Dallas grocery store on Feb. 16. Although the store lost energy, it was only open for cash sales.
Complicating matters further, Texas homes are designed to keep temperatures about 30 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the outside air during boring summers, so they don’t stay warm during icy winters, said Joshua Rhodes, associate. research at the University of Texas at Austin’s Webber Energy Group. Now that heat loss adds to the growing demand on the grid.
“Everything in Texas is centered around peak summer demand, when we’re all trying to air-condition our homes and keep 75 when they’re 105 outside,” Rhodes said. “We designed our houses for this difference of 30 degrees. But now our houses are trying to keep a difference of 60 degrees and are not designed to do so. It’s a losing battle. “
Under normal circumstances, network operators and utilities in Texas plan for maximum demand during the summer heat. During the winter, many factories stay offline and deliveries are shipped elsewhere, until hungry air conditioners and refrigerators send growing network demand around August. The outages now show that “demand forecasts were wrong and far too small,” said electricity analyst Nick Steckler.
“It was a great longing,” said Steckler, who heads the U.S. power unit at energy research firm BloombergNEF, which is a separate financial newswire company. “I can’t stress how much available capacity has exceeded total expected demand.”
On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called for an inquiry into ERCOT preparations, saying the issue was a matter of urgency in this legislative session to “ensure that Texans will never again experience power outages at scale on who have seen her in recent days. ”
“The Texas Electrical Reliability Council has been more than reliable for the past 48 hours,” Abbott said in a statement. “Too many Texans do not have electricity and heat for their homes because our state is facing freezing temperatures and severe winter weather. It is unacceptable.”
It was not just the network operator and the power plants that were to blame. Pipeline utilities whose supply lines froze, and even construction designers and construction practices that limited cold weather insulation made “Texas’ gas and electricity demand extremely sensitive to cold weather events,” Jenkins said. his Twitter thread.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Pike Electric service trucks line up after the February 16 snowstorm in Fort Worth, Texas.
In this regard, the disruptions echo another recent climate disaster that Texans have faced. After years of concrete expansion spreading more and more outward, Houston’s lack of climate planning left it vulnerable to catastrophic flooding when Hurricane Harvey landed in 2017. At the time, Andrew Dessler, a climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, HuffPost said the storm offered “a taste of the future.”
It is still impossible to know whether this particular cold snap is related to climate change and there is a lively debate about how much Arctic warming weakens forces in the stratosphere that normally maintain cold temperatures limited to the Earth’s northern latitudes. In 2018, Marlene Kretschmer, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, found that periods of a weakened “polar vortex” force had increased in the last four decades and that they accounted for about 60% of the cold extremities in the middle latitude. part of Eurasia during the period. But researchers argued last year in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that there was not enough data to make definitive statements about the connection.
Much less strict ethics and observance guide what political opportunists contribute to the discussion of what is happening in Texas.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) divided a 2014 image of a helicopter defrosting a wind turbine in Sweden, calling it “a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources such as natural gas and coal”.
The opposite ends of the media empire of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch have managed to project a unified message to blame on ice turbines.
As for the more prestigious newspaper, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal – a body whose desire to correct facts for ideological purposes has angered reporters in its newsroom – has attacked what it called “the paradox of the left-wing climate agenda: the less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them “, in an opinion piece entitled” A Deep Green Freeze “.
On the populist side of television, Fox News star Tucker Carlson drew attention to wind turbines in his Monday night monologue: “Everything worked great until the day it cooled down. Windmills failed like stupid fashion accessories, and the people of Texas died. This is not to beat the state of Texas – it’s a wonderful state, in fact – but to give you an idea of what is going to happen to you. “
Carlson delivered in his usual way, providing the kind of confusing political misinformation that the audience can now depend on for the next disasters.
“There always seems to be narratives that are very far from the reality that is happening,” Cohan said. “Gaslight is a good word for that.”
Sara Boboltz contributed to the reporting.
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