WASHINGTON – A devastating winter storm that plunged Texas into an electricity crisis offers warning signs for the United States, while the Biden government seeks to prepare for a future in which extreme weather conditions are a greater risk and the United States is almost entirely powered by renewable energy.
Power generation is a challenge. But an equally daunting task focuses on storing renewable energy for extreme events like the one that hit Texas.
In Texas, the center of a wave of disruptions in the southern and central parts of the U.S., the primary power grid suffered a double blow caused by a deep freeze: demand off the charts for energy while Texans tried to heat their homes and power plants that they simply couldn’t manage produce energy when people need it most.
Wind and solar power, still very small slices of the state’s energy matrix, played only a minor role in the sudden energy shortage, utility officials said – as opposed to a wave of conservative critics who falsely tried to blame renewable energy for the situation .
Still, the Texas crisis is a wake-up call that exposes how the US electrical infrastructure may not be fully prepared to absorb spikes in climate-related energy demand. The challenge tends to deepen as the United States relies more on wind and solar energy, known as “intermittent” sources, because they are subject to the vagaries of the climate and do not produce electricity 24 hours a day.
Electricity regulators said the United States would have to develop large sources of energy storage – like giant batteries – that depend on emerging technologies that have only recently started to become economical and viable on a large scale.
“For batteries to act as the ultimate backup system, we’re so far away that it’s not funny,” said Jim Robb, CEO of North American Electric Reliability Corp., a regulator, in an interview. “To really create the vision that we like to have, a highly decarbonized electrical system, you will have to have batteries installed in orders of magnitude beyond what we have now.”
North American Electric Reliability Corp. and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced on Tuesday that they were launching a joint investigation into what went wrong to trigger such widespread disruptions in the South and Midwest. At the end of Tuesday, more than 3.5 million customers were without power, the vast majority in Texas, according to the tracking website poweroutage.us.
The picture of what went wrong in Texas is incomplete. But while some wind generators went offline due to the freezing of the turbines, the largest network in the state, the Texas Electric Reliability Council, said the shortage was caused by a failure not of renewable sources, but of traditional “thermal” sources. : coal, nuclear and especially natural gas. Energy experts said the gas lines that supply the gas plants may have frozen or that supply to the plants may have been limited, as gas was prioritized for homes that depend on it for heating.
Texas dealership employees had planned what they hoped they might need in the event of winter spikes, taking into account the possibility of interruptions and less wind. The surge in demand during the storm surpassed the network operator’s highest estimate of just over 67,000 megawatts needed for an extreme peak load. And 34,000 megawatts were taken down, cutting the supply, said the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Texas produces more electricity than any other state, but only about a quarter of it comes from wind and solar energy, data from the US Energy Information Administration show.
President Joe Biden, in an executive order that he signed in his second week in office, set a goal of zeroing carbon dioxide emissions from US power generation by 2035, a goal that would require a rapid shift from the US toward to renewable energy sources and away from cleaner fossil fuels like natural gas.
However, these fossil fuels also tend to be the essential sources for surplus generation and backup, in part because they can be increased rapidly. This includes the “swivel reserve” capability, in which plants are already online and can add power to the grid like a tap almost instantly as demand decreases and decreases.
Proponents of fossil fuel preservation took advantage of this flexibility to present an argument for reliability, with a Wall Street Journal article published on Monday about the situation in Texas, stating: “Here is the paradox of the left’s climate agenda: the less use fossil fuels, the more we need them. “
But another emerging option could guarantee reliability without forcing the U.S. to revert to coal, gas and other carbon-intensive energy sources that contribute to climate change: energy storage, in which electricity from renewable sources can be stored and then released on the network when needed. it is necessary later.
For years, excess electricity from power generation has been used to pump water behind dams, where it can be released and transformed into hydroelectric power in the short term, turning the system into a huge battery.
More recently, technology to build real batteries that can store energy of the magnitude needed to help power a large grid has rapidly advanced in both capacity and accessibility, with major projects underway in California and an ambitious plan in Saudi Arabia to power a whole. the resort with what was considered the “largest battery storage facility in the world”.
But these solutions are still capable of providing only a small fraction of energy consumption, and almost the entire supply chain for making these storage units is abroad. What’s more, traditional lithium-ion batteries, also used in electric vehicles, can pump electricity at maximum output for just a few hours at a time, much less than the long stretches or even days that may be required to compensate for conditions peaks in demand.
But the development of technologies, including hydrogen units and flow batteries, may begin to address some of the shortcomings as the United States approaches 2035, the year in which the Biden government says carbon emissions must be eliminated from the supply of energy.
Omar AI-Juburi, a Ernst & Young partner who advises on energy and grid technology markets, compared the rapid development of large-scale battery storage to that of solar panels, which for years were exorbitantly expensive before costs went down dramatically. From 2015 to 2018, the cost of utility-scale battery storage fell by nearly 70 percent, the Energy Information Administration said.
“Everything indicates that it will continue to increase capacity, lower costs, become more commercially viable,” said Al-Jaburi. “Storage will not solve all your problems until 2035 or any date, but it will be an important factor.”
Biden, as a candidate, included investments in battery storage as an element of his proposal to spend $ 2 trillion on building a cleaner and more modern infrastructure in the United States. Your administration is expected to turn to this year’s ambitious agenda once its first spending priority, a Covid-19 aid package, is complete.
“Building a resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather conditions and climate change will play a key role in creating millions of well-paid union jobs, creating a clean energy economy and meeting the president’s goal. achieve a zero net emissions future by 2050, “said White House spokesman Vedant Patel.
While no single weather event can be attributed solely to climate change, the deadly cold that hit Texas was the latest reminder of how extreme weather can push the delicate web of power generators and transmission lines that make up our power grid beyond from its breaking point. In California, the extreme summer heatwaves have distorted the system on the other side, forcing blackouts when record demand for air conditioning overloads the system or the fear of starting wildfires in high winds drives utilities to close the lines.
Although it is extreme winter, not warmer temperatures, that is affecting Texas, some climate analysts believe that climate change may be playing a role, too, in the intense cold and storms that devastate the southern United States, a phenomenon that may continue or worsen. Rising temperatures in the Arctic may be decreasing the jet stream that serves as a kind of buffer for the polar vortex, preventing cold air from diving south.
But network operators can only plan for the peaks and peaks that come, a task of analyzing past trends and extrapolating forecasts that are getting increasingly difficult, said Michael Craig, who teaches power systems at the School of Environment and Sustainability of the University of Michigan.
“We are in a non-stationary world. Climate change means that it is not stationary, ”said Craig. “The past 40 years may not reflect what is to come in the next 40 years.”