The powerful winter storm that hit the continental United States this week hit Texas with arctic temperatures that caused widespread blackouts, plunging millions into darkness as snow and record cold paralyzed the country’s second largest state.
Republican lawmakers and right-wing experts who oppose the Biden government’s clean energy policies took the chance to blame the growing use of wind power by the Lone Star State for the disruptions.
But while production of all sources of electricity plummeted in Texas, frozen instruments in coal, nuclear and natural gas plants, along with a limited supply of natural gas, were the main cause of the continuous blackouts, Dan Woodfin, senior director at the Texas Electric Reliability Council, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. (ERCOT is the leading network operator in the state.)
Energy analysts and electricity experts said a complete failure to plan for extreme climate scenarios caused the kind of cascading disaster that is likely to become more common as climate chaos increases pressure on human systems.
Ironically, wind power was a bright spot for grid operators, as the resource, which tends to decline in the winter months, actually exceeded daily production forecasts over the past weekend.
ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Transmission towers and power lines lead to a substation after a snowstorm on February 16, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas.
“There is so much misinformation and ridiculous policy hitting that focuses on icy wind turbines when that is the part of the supply that ERCOT planned most realistically,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston. “For the coldest day of winter, they only expected to receive a small portion of the wind and solar energy pie.”
In contrast, the grid operator planned to obtain about 90% of the electricity load from what he calls “firm and reliable resources”, such as coal, natural gas and nuclear reactors, he said.
“It is a failure that our ‘firm and reliable resources’ have not been firm or reliable when we need them most,” said Cohan.
Of the nearly 70,000 megawatts of gas, coal and nuclear power plants, up to 30,000 megawatts have been offline since Sunday night, said Jesse Jenkins, an electricity expert at Princeton University.
“The main story remains the failure of thermal power plants – natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants – that ERCOT tells to be there when needed,” wrote Jenkins in a series of tweets Tuesday night. “They failed.”
LM Otero / AP Customers use the light of a cell phone to look at the meat section of a supermarket in Dallas on February 16. Although the store ran out of power, it was open for cash sales only.
To complicate matters further, homes in Texas are designed to keep temperatures around 30 degrees Fahrenheit lower than outside air during hot summers, so as not to contain heat during freezing winters, said Joshua Rhodes, associate researcher at University of Texas at Austin’s Webber Energy Group. Now, this heat loss is increasing the growing demand on the network.
“Everything in Texas focuses on the high demand of the summer, when we all try to air condition our homes and keep it at 75 when it’s 105 outside,” said Rhodes. “We designed our houses for this difference of 30 degrees. But now our houses are trying to maintain a difference of 60 degrees and were not designed for that. It is a losing battle. “
Under normal conditions, Texas network and utility operators plan peak demand during the summer heat. During the winter, many factories are shut down and supplies are sent elsewhere until energy-efficient air-conditioning systems and refrigerators increase network demand in August. Blackouts now show that “demand forecasts were wrong and were very, very low,” said electricity analyst Nick Steckler.
“It was a big failure,” said Steckler, who heads the United States energy unit at energy research firm BloombergNEF, which is a separate company from the financial news agency. “I cannot emphasize how much the available capacity has exceeded the expected total demand.”
On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) called for an investigation into ERCOT preparations, declaring the issue an emergency item in this legislative session to “ensure that Texans never again experience power outages on the scale that have seen in the past few days. “
“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable for the past 48 hours,” said Abbott in his statement. “Many Texans are without energy and heating for their homes, as our state faces freezing temperatures and a harsh winter. This is unacceptable.”
It was not just the network operator and the plants that were to blame. Pipeline utilities whose supply lines froze and even the designers and construction practices that limited insulation to cold climates made “Texas’ gas and electricity demand extremely sensitive to cold weather events,” Jenkins said in a statement. his Twitter topic.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Pike Electric’s service trucks line up after the February 16 snowstorm in Fort Worth, Texas.
In that sense, blackouts echo another recent climate disaster facing Texans. After years of concrete expansion spreading further and further, Houston’s lack of climate planning left it vulnerable to catastrophic floods when Hurricane Harvey hit the coast in 2017. At the time, Andrew Dessler, climatologist and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, HuffPost said the storm offered “a taste of the future.”
It is impossible to know yet if this particular cold wave is related to climate change, and there is an animated debate about how much warming in the Arctic is weakening the forces in the stratosphere that normally keep cold temperatures confined to the northern latitudes of the Earth. In 2018, Marlene Kretschmer, a scientist at the Potsdam Climate Impact Research Institute, found that periods of weakening of the “polar vortex” force had increased over the past four decades and that they accounted for about 60% of the cold extremes in mid-latitudes Eurasia during the period. But the researchers argued last year in the scientific journal Nature that there is not enough data to make definitive claims about the link.
Much less rigid ethics and adherence to facts guide the contribution of political opportunists to the discussion of what is happening in Texas.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) shared a 2014 image of a helicopter thawing 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 right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s media empire have managed to project a unified message by blaming the icy turbines as well.
On the side of the most prestigious newspapers, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board – an organ whose willingness to double the facts for ideological purposes drew the ire of reporters in its newsroom – attacked what it called “the paradox of the left’s climate agenda. : the less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them ”, in an opinion article entitled“ A Deep Green Freeze ”.
On the populist side of television, Fox News star Tucker Carlson focused on wind turbines in his Monday night monologue: “Everything was working great until the day it cooled off. Windmills failed like the stupid fashion accessories they are, and people died in Texas. This is not to hit the state of Texas – it’s a great state, actually – but to give you a sense of what’s going to happen to you. “
Carlson delivered the speech in his usual way, providing the kind of confusing political misinformation that the public can now depend on after disasters.
“There always seem to be narratives that are a long way from the reality that is happening,” said Cohan. “Gaslight is a good word for that.”
Sara Boboltz contributed reporting.
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