It would be a relief if the critics who blamed the frozen wind turbines for the paralyzing Texas power outage last week were correct. If they had been, it would be easy to understand why people in the second most populous state in the United States had to sleep in their cars and burn their belongings to keep warm after the freezing winter caused temperatures to drop to -18ºC. Unfortunately, early indications suggest that the reasons are much more complicated.
It is true that the oil-rich state is a colossus of wind. Despite relying heavily on natural gas, Texas leads the US in wind power generation and, already in 2017, had enough wind capacity installed to make it the sixth largest wind power in the world, if it were a country.
As a result, wind farms sometimes provide a large amount of electricity to Texans, usually in the windiest spring. Last May, the wind contributed a record 59 percent of hourly energy demand. But the story is different in winter, when less wind is expected and planned at peak times of need.
With this winter’s brutal freeze falling, some of the state’s wind turbines crashed before last week’s shutdown. But as the Arctic cold continued, other generators were also down, including some of the natural gas plants that last year supplied 46% of Texas energy – double the 23% of wind farms.
Network operators predicted record demand as the cold explosion approached, but they did not expect so many plants to relent under pressure. A thorough investigation into what went wrong will take weeks to complete, but it is clear that wind farms were not the only problem. As a network official said last Tuesday: “It seems that a large part of the generation that went offline today was mainly due to problems in the natural gas system.”
Furthermore, Texas is not called the Lone Star State for nothing. Unlike other states, it depends almost entirely on its own power grid. This brought benefits, but it also meant that, last week, it was not possible to import electricity easily to compensate for deficiencies. Another weakness of the Texas energy system is the lack of incentives for companies to make the necessary investments to ensure that the energy infrastructure can withstand extreme weather conditions.
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This is not a new problem. Federal regulators warned a decade ago, when another cold and bitter front led to blackouts, that state power plants could have trouble repeating the episode. As some commentators have noted, wind farms operate in places much colder than Texas, from Sweden to Minnesota. But “winter preparation” with cold weather kits can cost $ 150,000 per turbine.
In pleasant Texas, the “summer” of turbines and other energy equipment, to ensure that they can deal with heat waves, may seem more obvious – which highlights another worrying aspect of last week’s blackouts. Scientists have warned for years that a change in climate would lead to a more extreme and unpredictable climate. Texas has shown the dangers of underestimating the risks that this poses to infrastructure.
Finally, it is clear that today’s power systems have a very reliable resource. Whenever blackouts occur, some critics will instantly blame renewable energies and the politicians who support them.
When the lights went out in California last summer, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz tweeted that the Democratic-ruled state “was now unable to perform even the basic functions of civilization, such as having reliable electricity”. The senator’s Twitter feed went quieter when his home state went dark. That is good. Politicizing something as vital and basic as electricity has never made sense. Texas just gave a lesson on why it ended.
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