The resulting crisis could be a boon to Biden’s proposal to spend huge sums of money to harden the country’s electricity grid, which connects gigantic wind and solar plants to cities and states thousands of miles away. This is an essential step if the United States wants to take an important turn towards relying on solar, wind and other renewable energy to keep the lights on.
“When the supply doesn’t show up, legislative or regulatory intervention begins,” said Kevin Book, director of consulting firm ClearView Energy Partners. “Reactivity to a supply shock is one of the few things you can trust.”
Freezing temperatures have increased Texas’ energy demand to levels that eclipsed even the hottest summer days. Network operators there and across the Midwest have implemented continuous blackouts to prevent further damage to the network, but in Texas alone, 4 million customers have been without power since Monday.
Investigations into the causes are just beginning, but data from the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s electricity grid, showed that at least 30 gigawatts of natural gas, coal and nuclear power were shut down on Monday, along with with 16 gigawatts of renewable energy.
National Republicans – and those with national aspirations – used photos of frozen wind turbines to hammer Washington’s green energy agenda, although Texas operates a network outside federal supervision and has spent decades making its own energy decisions.
“If the last few days have proved anything, it is that we need oil and gas,”tweeted George P. Bush, who as Texas Land Commissioner oversees much of the state’s oil and gas production. “To rely solely on renewable energy would be catastrophic. Many of these sources have proven to be unreliable. “
“Texas is frozen, as people run out of energy to stay safe and warm,” Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.) Tweeted on Tuesday. “This is a perfect example of the need for reliable sources of energy, such as natural gas and coal.”
But the extreme cold has disrupted a large part of these fossil fuel sources as well. The natural gas wells froze and the coal and nuclear generators in Texas were shut down, as Abbott himself recognized.
In addition, the national debate about green energy versus fossil fuels is no longer what it was 10 or 20 years ago. The balance of power has shifted as the auto industry, Wall Street and even some fossil fuel companies line up behind renewable energy and move to shape the multi-billion dollar transition to cleaner energy, a change they advocate in economic terms.
“Wind and solar and, increasingly, storage are the most competitive options in terms of costs in the electricity grid,” said Jeff Dennis, managing director of Advanced Energy Economy, a national association of large energy users and other companies that defend the clean energy. “There is a real case to be made to quickly scale our investment in these technologies to improve our reliability and resilience.”
The change made the usual blame game for Washington’s energy less one-sided. Biden’s allies, both inside and outside the government, spread the message that the explosion in the Arctic showed the urgency to fight climate change and was another example of the disasters the country can expect from extreme weather conditions.
“We need to think about how our general infrastructure can accommodate unusual and increasingly common events,” said Representative Sean Casten (D-Ill.). “It is tragic that so many people across the hall are using it to destroy renewable energy.”
Clean energy groups were quick to provide support for Democrats. The American Council on Renewable Energy, a commercial clean energy group, said specific regional conditions aggravated the crisis in Texas: the state’s power grid, while geographically large, is almost completely isolated from the rest of the country, so it could not consume energy from other regions. In contrast, parts of the Midwest that avoided Texas’s fate are members of regional power grids connected by high voltage transmission lines.
ACORE said that expanding these interregional power lines would make the network more resilient, preventing future crises.
“It is time for Congress to approve an ambitious infrastructure initiative aimed at expanding and upgrading America’s power grid,” said Greg Wetstone, ACORE CEO, in a statement.
The Biden plan aims to make the economy greener and is likely to include money for additional transmission lines, weather protection, battery storage, burial of power lines and other improvements to the power grid.
“[The grid] it really is super infrastructure and we need to make sure it is resilient, ”said Melanie Kenderdine, director of the Energy Futures Initiative and former head of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis under President Barack Obama. “We need to think about burying the main critical electricity infrastructure. Expensive? Yes, but the whole state of Texas was closing. “
Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT, which manages the state’s electricity grid, said the extreme weather was “unprecedented” in the operator’s existence, but that on Tuesday night the operator had restored some of the power. Despite another storm in the forecast, slightly higher temperatures should allow more generators to resume.
The White House, meanwhile, was avoiding being drawn into the debate on Tuesday.
The Biden government, for the time being, is focusing on “ensuring that millions of people across Texas affected by the storm have the relief they need,” press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “Clearly, as there are investments in future forms of energy across the country, they will need to plan for inclement weather, but I think it is a discussion and conversation that is yet to come.”
Zack Colman and Ben Lefebvre contributed to this report.