More than 4 million Texans lost power after a weekend storm that paralyzed the state’s energy infrastructure.
The storm, which Governor Greg Abbott declared a statewide disaster on Friday, caused at least 25 deaths, most of them in Texas, a state whose energy infrastructure was not built for a storm of this magnitude. At least two died in a house that tried to keep warm by starting the car in the garage, leading to carbon monoxide poisoning.
“This was an extraordinary event for Texas,” said Bill Magness, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees about 90 percent of Texas energy production and has ordered outages across the state.
“This one went from top to bottom and everywhere, with very cold temperatures, freezing rain, snow like we haven’t seen for decades,” he said in a telephone interview. “We knew that, upon entering, this would represent an extraordinary demand on the electrical system.”
CenterPoint Energy, which serves the Houston area, announced on Tuesday that its targeted outages, currently affecting 1.27 million people, “can last for several days.”
Texas has been hit by single-digit temperatures, snow and hail since Thursday, with more forecast. The Dallas area saw temperatures below freezing on Tuesday, the coldest temperature on record since 1949, with additional rainfall expected on Wednesday.
Historically, Texas’ high energy demand days are always summer, Magness said. “We were seeing demand forecasts near the peak of the summer,” he said. The two largest sources of energy in the state, natural gas and non-hydroelectric renewable energy, such as wind turbines and solar energy, were severely damaged by the winter storm.
“In winter, it is more difficult to get supplies of natural gas, because they are much more in demand for domestic heating and uses,” he said. Strong wind and snow have interfered with some natural gas equipment and frozen wind turbines, and cloudy weather has dramatically decreased solar panel production, he said.
The problems are exacerbated because Texas, the largest energy producer and consumer in the United States, is the only state to use its own power grid. This exempts him from federal regulations, including those that could require him to be better prepared for a terrible cold wave, said Peter Fox-Penner, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Energy at Boston University.
“Texas’s deregulation philosophy has made them put far less stringent rules on generators and system operators to be prepared for cold weather than other systems, where extreme cold is more common,” he said in an interview.
“They believed that this kind of ‘perfect storm’ was so unlikely that they didn’t need the system to prepare for it,” said Fox-Penner.
The storm’s double blow and sudden power outages caused wide-ranging damage across the state.
For the Fagan Family Farms, a small independent organic farm in Kyle, Texas, the loss of produce from the cold spell was bad enough, but the power outage was devastating. They had about $ 20,000 worth of lettuce growing in the electrically heated nursery, said owner Shawn Fagan – about a fifth of his annual business – and now it’s all gone.
“I had the next generation growing up in the nursery,” he said by phone. “Not only do I have nothing on the field, but I also have nothing to put on the field now.”