Texas’ huge energy crisis didn’t have to happen, experts say – and it doesn’t have to happen again. The authorities can start working on solutions now that they can prevent future blackouts. But unless the state starts to work fast, its energy system will be vulnerable to the next shock.
To begin with, the Texas network needs to prepare for more extreme weather scams, and the change cannot stop there. Improving homes and buildings is a simple way to keep people safe during catastrophic conditions, such as this week’s cold snap. Emergency response efforts also need an update.
Michael Bates, general manager of energy at Intel, lives in Austin, where he and his mother have had no power for three days. “She is 86 years old and lives as a pioneer in front of the fireplace,” says Bates. “For me, it is unnecessary. There is technology today that, if we implement it correctly, the next time it happens, the pain will be much less ”.
Bates is working to develop smart grid technology at Intel that can find where energy is being wasted so that energy can be distributed where it is really needed in a crisis. There was outrage, for example, at the empty, well-lit skyscrapers that hovered over downtown Houston on Monday night, while more than 1.3 million people across the city faced imminent disruptions. Utilities said some neighborhoods avoided blackouts because they were close to hospitals or other critical infrastructure that needed to maintain power. This uneven distribution of interruptions would not be a problem with a smart grid, says Bates. “With the laser, with precision similar to a scalpel, you can turn off or dim the lights in the building … and avoid having to black out by being able to connect in real time to these assets.”
This type of network upgrade can also facilitate the use of energy from distributed resources, such as residential solar panels or even electric vehicles. When connected to batteries and smart grids, renewable energy sources can provide consistency equal to or even better than the system we have now, which depends on fossil fuels. “The industry may see this as highly damaging, but the solutions and technology are not that complicated. They exist today, is it just how we apply them to this problem? ”Says Bates.
Other corrections depend on rethinking Texas’ energy and infrastructure policies, rather than adopting new technologies. The state’s power system could do more to weather its system against the cold – something that was recommended after similar cold-induced blackouts in 2011 and 1989. Frozen gas wells and pipes were largely to blame for the current outages, although authorities knew they were vulnerable to cold temperatures.
Lone Star State also lives up to its nickname when it comes to its energy infrastructure. The grids of other states are interconnected, so that one state can obtain energy from another state when necessary. This is not the case for most of Texas. “There are parts of the grid on the East Coast or the West Coast that have excess energy now that they could be selling to us, but we just can’t go into it,” says Joshua Rhodes, an associate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “Perhaps we should be better interconnected with other parts of the United States.”
Any overhaul of the Texas power grid – whether it involves making it smarter or connecting it to the rest of the country – needs to start happening soon. “If we had another storm like this in two weeks, we would probably have exactly the same thing happening. Sometimes it takes years and decades to build the infrastructure, ”says Rhodes. “We must start now.”
Disaster management plans, on the other hand, can change much faster and can achieve some of the same goals as efforts to upgrade the network. “Focusing on how you handle emergencies, in terms of actually providing services to people, may be more productive than thinking about specific updates to the network at times,” says Emily Grubert, assistant professor of environmental engineering at the Institute of Technology at Georgia.
Some of them are simple and are already in progress. During this storm, communities opened “heating centers” where people can take shelter in a heated place if there is a power outage at home. It is similar to a strategy that many cities use during heat waves; they open “cooling centers” where people can get together for free air conditioning.
Air conditioning in homes is another easy way to keep people safe from future climate disasters, say Grubert and Rhodes. The added benefit is that better insulation protects against extreme temperature fluctuations in any direction. This is an important consideration, as climate change is generally driving Texas toward more extreme heat, not extreme cold.
Ultimately, protecting people from devastating power outages in the future will require predicting new disasters – not just responding to previous ones. “We tend to see this a lot with infrastructure systems where we have an emergency and we started to want to react to basically prevent that particular emergency from happening again,” says Grubert. “I think I prefer that we focus after this event, it’s really thinking about how we respond to emergency conditions. There will always be something for which we are not prepared. “