Last week, Texas was hit by a terrible winter storm that left millions of people without electricity. Although much of the power grid has been restored, there are still ongoing problems with Texas’ infrastructure, from plumbing problems to people struggling to meet needs like food and water. However, the most immediate crisis was that Texas, a state unaccustomed to the wintry climate, left millions of people unheated in freezing temperatures. At one point, Texas public services were less than five minutes from a blackout that could have lasted for weeks or months. Experts believe it will take months to fully calculate the death toll, although almost 80 storm-related deaths have so far been confirmed.
Republicans like Texas Governor Greg Abbott have argued, not surprisingly, that the massive power outage somehow discredits leftist policies. “It shows how the New Deal Green would be a deadly business for the United States of America,” Abbott told Fox News on Tuesday, adding later that the problem was with “[o]our wind and our solar “and claiming that” just shows that fossil fuel is needed. “
However, the reality of what went wrong and what can be done to prevent this type of crisis, experts agree, is much more complicated. And it starts with understanding how our power grid works.
The American grid, which The Wall Street Journal described in 2016 as “one of the engineering marvels of modern history”, can be traced back to the modern concept of grid designs. These, in turn, originated in the late 1800s, according to Dr. Alexis Kwasinksi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering. The aim was to provide electricity to as many people as possible at the lowest possible cost.
“The solution to such a design problem led to the concept of a power grid in which some large plants provide electricity for many more, but much smaller, loads located sometimes hundreds of kilometers away from the plants,” Kwasinski told Salon by e-mail. . “One of the solutions to maintain the stability of the system was to interconnect power plants and loads so that they operate at an aggregate level.” As a result of this interconnected approach, the United States developed long transmission lines in several states so that energy could be transmitted over long distances with low losses.
One problem with this approach, explained Kwasinski, is that, since everything is interconnected, all different loads receive the same power quality. As a result, it is expensive to change power networks so that energy can be allocated according to the needs of individual locations in order to avoid power outages or to prioritize regions with more urgent needs.
Kwasinski says resilience was not an objective in the design of energy networks – at least, not yet. “It is only recently that society [has] began to demand greater resilience of the electric network “, he lamented.
The problem is that power networks were originally designed to meet the needs of the early 20th century. Even more modern power systems are planned decades in advance, which means that the existing Texas power grid is the result of planning processes carried out decades ago, says Kwasinski.
“At that time (say in 2011), no planner knew that in February 2021 the state’s electricity grid would be subject to these cold conditions, even when there were power outages during the winter of 2011 due to insufficient power generation,” he added. Texan engineers were understandably thinking that they needed to design with the heat waves in mind, not the types of winter storms that you are likely to encounter in the northeast.
Dr. Masoud Barati, who is also an assistant professor in Pittsburgh’s electrical and computer engineering department, explained to Salon exactly how things went wrong in Texas. He explained this in the context of the HVDC line, or the high voltage direct current, and what was the primary operation of the existing HVDC at Texas’ Electric Reliability Council (ERCOT). He explained that in the Texas blackout there were five HVDC interconnections that totaled 1.1 GW of “connecting line capacity as interconnection with other states and neighboring countries”. This proved insufficient for two reasons: first, “the peak winter load recorded by ERCOT was 69,150 MW and 34 GW of loss of thermal and renewable generation resources”, which means that “the 1.1 GW HVDC cannot withstand the significant loss and generation load “.
In addition, because Texas’ neighbors were hit by the same storm and nearly exhausted their ability to generate energy or found that the amount of electricity generated was less than the demand, because most homes in Texas used that electricity for heating.
Ironically, although Governor Abbott tried to argue that the winter storm and blackout somehow discredited the Green New Deal, it actually illustrated precisely why we need one.
“From a New Deal Green perspective, we would like to have public services that prioritize public safety, resilience and disaster preparedness over the ideal price in a situation of perfect market balance and a very good climate, so I think it is an important distinction, “Daniel Aldana Cohen, associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of” A planet to win: why we need a green deal, “said Salon. After noting that the Texas power grid is deregulated and therefore undemocratic – “you don’t have a clear line of responsibility the way it should with a public system” – Cohen argued that the solution to energy inefficiency issues, as presented in your book, it is a national power grid.
“You would have a single national network, very robustly interconnected,” explained Cohen. “This would mean a network dominated by renewable energy sources like wind and solar. By virtue of having this full national interconnection, when there is less energy or there is no energy in one region of the country, you can discharge energy there from other regions. “
For example, in the case of events like the Texas winter storm, a national power grid would have allowed public authorities to divert energy that was stored elsewhere in the national system so that it could be diverted to where it was most needed. When it comes to resilience to disasters, such as extreme weather events, a national power grid “would essentially mean that there is a national energy solidarity that covers the entire country, rather than having a large region that has to defend itself.”
Cohen also warned that if a New Green Agreement is not implemented, we could end “a kind of eco-apartheid situation in which, to a large extent, white and wealthy people can basically accumulate solar panels and batteries and resilience at the expense of a totally egalitarian system where literally every home and community is guaranteed safety and reliability. “
Barati offered a somewhat different set of suggestions to the Salon.
“If only Texas had stronger connections to the rest of the US with HVDC and HVAC [High Voltage Alternating Current] lines, they would be fine, “wrote Barati. He also pointed out that” if only proper reliability planning was carried out, taking into account the expansion of the coordinated transmission line and the generation planning subject to rare and common events, the Texas would have adequate generation reserves. ”In addition, he noted that“ Texas has an energy-only market, which means that it is vulnerable to rare events. If only Texas had a capacity market functioning properly for both generation and transmission sides, they would have enough spare transmission and generation capacity to deal with the shortage. “
Whichever solution you prefer, one thing is likely: because of climate change, we should expect to see more extreme weather in areas not used to it, from forest fires on the West Coast to the winter storm in Texas.
“The path is through the changes in the environment that occurred with climate change,” wrote Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to the Salon when asked about the potential role of climate change in Texas winter. . storm. “This includes generally warmer conditions, including much warmer oceans, higher sea surface temperatures, reduced sea ice and glaciers, and increased water vapor in the atmosphere.” Trenberth noted that the extra energy available has accelerated the water cycle, leading to more evaporation and stronger rainfall.
FIX: An earlier version of this story misidentified the acronym HVAC for heating, ventilation and air conditioning. The story has been updated.