This week’s Texas catastrophe left more than 4 million people in the dark and in the cold, and even more without drinking water, when a rare blast of Arctic air lowered temperatures, freezing natural gas plants and wind turbines.
Texas “planned more for heat waves than ice storms,” said Dan Reicher, who worked in the Clinton administration’s Department of Energy on renewable energy and is now at Stanford University. And the responsibility now lies with figuring out how to avoid a repeat – a complicated situation given the independence of the Texas network and strong opposition from Republicans there to connect with other states and give federal regulators the oversight of their power system.
So far, the Biden government has shown little sign of pushing its agenda in Texas, which already leads the country in wind power. But Congress is looking to hearings to analyze power failures this week, which are likely to put a spotlight on the state’s power grid.
“How much and how far does the Biden government want to go from a broader federal perspective? And that remains to be seen, ”said Reicher.
Although scientists have definitely not linked climate change to the polar vortex that caused temperatures to plummet this week, evidence is starting to show that years of rising temperatures in the Arctic may be playing a role in altering the route of the jet stream it fed the frigid winds in the southern states.
“I think you’re opening the freezer door,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University.
And although Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said the link to climate change has not been established, it is undeniable that climate change is fueling more “tail risk” events that were once considered rare. And both Texas and California, which suffered a devastating heat wave and record forest fires last year, pose important questions about how to protect critical infrastructure in a warmer world.
“It’s kind of the insurance issue,” said Dessler. “How much do you pay for insurance and risk never using it again, versus not having insurance and then being eliminated?”
California has been experiencing the effects of climate change on its network for years – forest fires that threaten transmission have increased in size and duration, heat waves have increased in intensity and duration, and droughts in the northwest are restricting the crucial supply of hydropower. . In response to increasing forest fire damage liabilities, which forced Pacific Gas & Electric Company to go bankrupt in 2019, state utilities have increasingly shut down transmission lines during windstorms to reduce the likelihood of sparks.
In an effort to reduce carbon emissions and bring more power generation to the state, California has set aggressive renewable targets, increasing the amount of solar capacity in its network in the past decade to 27 gigawatts in 2019, more than a third of the country’s solar production, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. And to balance its network, it helped build an 11-state energy market that allows it to export excess solar energy during the day and extract electricity from other sources after sunset.
But August’s unplanned blackouts – the first in the state since the 2000-2001 power crisis – highlighted other deficiencies in California’s power grid. An analysis of the state of the failures that shut down 490,000 customers for two hours one night and 320,000 customers for less time the other night, blamed the historic heat wave across the west, which saw demand increase and limited the amount of energy that California could import from other states. But it also pointed to the high proportion of renewable energy in the state, which sees its electricity production drop dramatically as the sun sets, requiring other plants to increase rapidly – which they were unable to do that week.
Like California, Texas suffered from a power shortage at a key moment: in the space of an hour on Monday morning, 30 gigawatts of generation – a quarter of all state capacity – fell from the grid as soon as one Deep freezing has driven demand to levels generally seen only in the summer. This led to several days of blackouts affecting 4.4 million Texas customers.
Texas’ problems may stem in part from its open market rules, which differ from markets in other regions of the country, many of which require a “capacity market”, where energy producers commit to keeping their plants available years in the future. When the cold wave descended on the state, restricting natural gas shipments and freezing wind turbines, several power plants that could have helped fill the gap were out of line for maintenance.
And the state also failed to heed the warnings of a report on a similar freeze in 2011, which required isolating generators to protect against the cold – an expensive solution, but one that could have mitigated disruptions.
Experts say that increasing connections across the country that allow energy to move long distances can help prevent future blackouts.
Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said that both Texas and California could benefit from closer coordination with their neighbors – and Biden can help with that.
“There is a shared dilemma between our situations and it is related to how to take into account the climatic extremes associated with climate change,” he said. “In both situations, the real world has by far exceeded the planned extreme case.”
Texas resisted this strategy and, by refusing to cross state borders, the state kept federal regulators away from its power grid. This is left to its own devices when resources fail to meet demand – as has almost happened several times in recent years, when the summer heat has pushed the system to its limit.
“There are a lot of fingers pointed by politicians in Texas right now, but there are some very painful lessons for them in terms of how their market is run,” said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. “One of Texas’s weaknesses is that they are not very well connected to any other part of the country.”
While the immediate focus is on restoring power across the state, some have begun to think about how the grid can prepare for the future.
“The only common element of the situation in California and what appears to be the case in Texas is the climate,” Richard Glick, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told reporters on Thursday. “All experts tell us that this kind of wild and unforeseen weather is going to happen much more often than it did in the past. It is up to us and others to ensure that the network is more resistant to these specific extreme weather events.”
Glick questioned whether Texas should continue its independent approach, noting that nearby states with access to generation via transmission lines have managed to recover more quickly from the deep freeze, including much of the upper midwest and even El Paso and Lubbock, Texas, operating outside the primary Texas network. This Midwestern power grid is managed by network operators connected to the rest of the country and suffered blackouts on Monday and Tuesday, but was largely recovered on Wednesday.
Power grid experts have called for massive construction of transmission lines for decades to ensure that the power supply problems suffered by California and Texas could be alleviated by replacing the supply of deactivated plants with electricity from other parts of the country, or even Canada and Mexico. This is an approach that the Biden government will likely try to take, but they will need to find a way to target the billions or trillions of necessary spending and figure out how to solve the bureaucratic problems that have slowed the process for decades.
“The problem is not that transmission providers are looking for handouts,” said Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, an association of transmission builders. “If the broadcast [needs are] identified and placed on a transmission plan, we will build it. Two real areas that are obstacles to building more transmission infrastructure: one is licensing and location, the other is cost allocation. Who pays for it. “
Green groups generally agree that more transmission is needed – connecting sunny and windy rural areas to population centers will be the key to decarbonising the network – but they don’t think that more cables will be the end of the process. Instead, they point to new technologies, such as the development of “microgrids” that are less dependent on distant power supplies and the launch of batteries that can store energy when needed.
“First of all, we need to recognize that we probably cannot avoid all of the disruptions of this type that we are likely to see in the next 30 years,” said Mark Dyson, director of clean energy think tank Rocky Mount Institute. “It is past time to recognize a fundamental vulnerability in the power system and take advantage of where we are now with digital technologies, more distributed technology, storage and flexibility and address the root cause and not play around with these large-scale systems. “
Republicans are unlikely to adopt an infrastructure bill loaded with green energy incentives, like the one Biden plans. But some conservatives argue that the bill can do much to make the power grid more resistant to weather events.
“It looks like an infrastructure bill is likely to be moved and will include energy supplies,” said former Republican FERC commissioner Bernard McNamee, now a partner at McGuire Woods law firm.
“I don’t think this is a simple solution. It will be a lot of hard work, a lot of thinking by smart people to come up with practical solutions,” he added.