Texas’ Energy Outages – Here is the Fact About Why They Occurred and What We Should Do Subsequent – Watts Up With That?

Guest post by Chuck DeVore

There are two general reasons for the persistent power outages in Texas

By Chuck DeVore | Fox News

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When Texas went into a deep freeze on February 14, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio broke seven record lows in three days. Ice-laden trees snapped at power lines. Wind turbines stalled while some reliable natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants failed to bring power to the grid. The demand for electricity reached an all-time high – but the supply was not available and plunged around four million Texans into the cold and darkness.

When massive gas-powered turbines shut down across Texas and the lights went out, an aggressive narrative emerged: The power grid failed in Texas, not because the wind and sun failed, but because there was a lack of regulatory power to force the electrical industry – from natural gas producers to pipeline operators to to power generators and finally the transmission line companies – to wintering. It was a failure of the unregulated free market in Texas. In addition, due to climate change, this extreme weather event was a harbinger of further developments that required even more wind and solar energy.

This story, published by the renewable industry and environmentalists, found a sympathetic mouthpiece in the corporate media.

The narrative is wrong.

There are three power grids in the continental US, with Texas having its own power grid that provides electricity to about 90% of Texans. This electrical independence enables Texans to evade some federal interference in their electrical affairs – although Texans are also largely responsible for their own problems.

To address these issues, Texan lawmakers held marathon hearings a week after the freeze. That testimony and the increasing flow of information from local operators have provided a more complete picture of what went wrong during a storm that plunged Texas into a freezer colder than most of Alaska.

There are two general reasons for the persistent power outages in Texas, one near the storm, which includes a number of on-site and cold-related failures, and one the result of long-term policies.

However, it was the political failures over 20 years that allowed the storm-induced failures to become persistent and fatal.

It’s important to note that any Texas generator that ran on natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydropower while running at full power during the height of storm demand would still have experienced scheduled blackouts in Texas. The fact that the Texas power grid is becoming increasingly dependent on unreliable wind and sun is largely responsible for this critical deficiency.

Federal and state tax policies have encouraged the superstructure of wind power and, to a lesser extent, solar power, which led to cheap, subsidized electricity flooding the Texas grid. This inexpensive but unreliable energy has severely hampered the construction of the necessary natural gas power plants.

In the past five years, installed wind and solar capacity in Texas has increased by around 20,000 megawatts, with the net loss of 4,000 megawatts from gas and coal-fired power plants increasing. Those 4,000 megawatts, if built or not prematurely retired, would have saved lives during Valentine’s Day storm in 2021.

Since ERCOT, the Texas network operator, did not have enough reliable safety margins, things quickly got worse when something went wrong early Monday morning.

Did the unusually cold weather lead to power plant failures?

Winter isn’t over yet, but Texas – and California and other western states – are at increased risk of power outages this summer.

We know wind turbines were affected, half of which are frozen. Over the course of 2019, Texas wind produced about 34% of its capacity – hour to hour and season to season, sometimes more than 70%, sometimes close to zero. At one point during the storm, solar was producing no electricity, while wind was producing about 1% of its potential output. Since electricity has to be generated at the moment it is needed, natural gas power plants had to compensate for the shortage.

The emerging data from thermal gas, coal and nuclear power plants suggests that there have been some cold-related failures. However, when ERCOT struggled to keep the lights on, the grid became unstable and triggered additional power plants offline to protect their massive generators from destructive interactions with a fluctuating grid frequency.

When ERCOT gave the order to begin load shedding – rotating power outages – some of the darkened circuits contained infrastructure for vital oil and gas. This uncoordinated move has freed gas-fired power plants from their fuel – resulting in another blackout and the widespread and false rumor that the wellhead and pipeline are freezing, which contributed to the disaster.

When these systems lost power, gas production decreased by 75%. An Obama-era environmental rule that forced oilfield compressors to switch from natural gas to electricity likely made matters worse. Eventually, electricity was restored and natural gas production restarted to meet electricity generation needs.

Winter isn’t over yet, but Texas – and California and other western states – are at increased risk of power outages this summer. This is due to a policy that favors unreliability – wind and sun – over reliable electricity from gas, coal and nuclear power.

In Texas it is a superstructure of the wind. A Mandated Solar superstructure in California. In both states, this has meant that the power grid is increasingly threatened by blackouts in times when nature does not work together.

If America builds more wind and sun – with another push by the Biden administration – the cost of preventing blackouts in the form of massive battery farms to store electricity or an increasing number of emergency gas power plants will rise. Instead, we should end subsidies for all energy sources and let wind and sun pay for the reliability costs they place on the grid.

Chuck DeVore

Vice President for National Initiatives
Texas Public Policy Foundation

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