The entire state of Texas was on a winter storm alert on Monday, with snow falling across the state and single digit temperatures as south as Austin and San Antonio. While Texans started their heaters on Sunday night, low temperatures brought down several power generation plants, prompting the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) – which manages the state’s independent power grid – to order continuous blackouts at 1:25 am Monday instead of risking a collapse of the entire grid.
More than 2 million customers lost electricity on Monday morning, and on Monday night, 4.2 million Texas customers were left without power as temperatures reached low records, according to PowerOutage.us, a site that monitors power outages across the country. Texas utilities are warning these families that they may not be able to get power until Tuesday afternoon or at night, just before a second storm is forecast. What went wrong?
First, Texas is not prepared for extreme cold. “The power grid was designed to be in high demand during the summer, when Texans turn on their home air conditioning,” The Texas Tribune explains. “Some of the energy sources that supply the grid during the summer are turned off during the winter.” Wholesale energy prices in the largely deregulated Texas market soared over the weekend, prompting power generators to maximize their production, Wall Street Newspaper reports. Then, the wind turbines without weather started to freeze and the natural gas and coal plants shut down.
“This climate event is truly unprecedented,” said ERCOT senior director of system operations, Dan Woodfin, on Monday, pointing to the 1940s as the last time Texas faced this combination of arctic temperatures and chills. “Most of the plants that went off the air overnight and today were powered” by coal, gas or nuclear power, he added. About 40 percent of Texas’s electricity comes from natural gas-fired power plants, followed by wind turbines (23 percent), coal (18 percent) and nuclear power (11 percent), the daily reports, citing 2020 data from ERCOT.
With 30 gigawatts of power generation off – enough to power nearly 6 million homes – the blackouts have stopped. The blackouts were supposed to last less than an hour in each house, but “the local utilities kept the energy in neighborhoods with hospitals, firefighters and water treatment plants”, the daily reports. “There was so little extra energy that utilities were unable to run blackouts in neighborhoods that lacked critical infrastructure, leaving some homes without power for more than 12 hours.”
More stories from theweek.com
7 sarcastically funny caricatures about the cowardice of republican impeachment
Republicans are suddenly very much in favor of a third political party, according to Gallup
The Republican Party of North Carolina censors Senator Burr for Trump’s impeachment vote. Burr calls this “truly sad” for the GOP.