Reposted by Forbes
The recent severe snowstorm in the United States resulted in a catastrophic power outage in Texas that left millions of people without access to electricity or heat for several days and the death toll has not yet been fully recorded. The state was about 4 minutes and seconds away from a catastrophic grid failure that would have left residents of the state without power for weeks or months. If that had happened, tens of thousands of people would have been at risk of freezing to death.
Political leaders in Asia, Africa and Latin America, aware that reliable and affordable electricity for their rising middle classes is a prerequisite for taking office, would no doubt ask in disbelief, “How could this happen in Texas, the power plant? the US, the country that surpassed Russia in 2011 to become the world’s largest producer of natural gas and passed Saudi Arabia in 2018 to become the world’s largest producer of oil? “
Energy planners and network engineers in many developing countries work with a creaky network infrastructure, and frequent failures mean that many of their customers have diesel gensets as backups. The irony won’t be lost: last week, President Biden ordered the federal government to deliver diesel generators and diesel fuel, along with other relief supplies, to Texas amid the blackouts caused by extreme cold.
Political Lessons from the Texas Debacle
For energy policy makers around the world, the lessons of the Texas debacle will be a red flag in their own planning for the reliability and resilience of the power grid to adverse events. British The Telegraph made a headline: “Power outages in high-energy Texas are a wake-up call for razor-sharp Great Britain.” Lessons from politics will not be easy to learn, however.
Like most controversy in America today, the Texas power grid failures when it was most needed resulted in a blizzard of blame and pointing that was largely partisan. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated in a tweet, “The infrastructure failures in Texas are literally what happens if you don’t pursue a Green New Deal.” Renewable energy fans insist that ERCOT’s grid managers never expected it during one Ice storms have to rely on intermittent wind power. They accuse “fossil fuel interests and their allies in the Republican Party” of hiding the “real culprit”: natural gas and electricity grids “poorly prepared to cope with severe winter conditions after years of deregulation”. On the flip side, the conservative think tank of the Texas Public Policy Foundation claims that the storm “would never have been a problem if our electricity grid hadn’t been so infused with renewable energy sources.” MORE FOR TEENAGER Technology behind the $ 1 trillion -Evaluation of Bitcoin and Its Uses Beyond CryptocurrencyHow to Avoid Climate Disasters, The Bill Gates WayThe Dirty Secrets of “Clean” Electric Vehicles
Who is right?
That is an extremely important question. The life and basic comfort of many people are at stake. The fate of many planners or politicians around the world literally depends on whether they are on the right side in the debate over the Texas debacle. Much more is at stake for developing countries as the lower per capita income of their constituents carries risks that few in the rich world can appreciate.
Perhaps the cause of the power outages was simply the one-time extreme weather, for which neither coal, gas, nuclear nor wind generators would have been prepared due to short-sighted, profit-oriented planning in a deregulated market (like the Texas Tribune).
Unfortunately, if that were only true. For those skilled in the engineering, business, and public order of power grids, the Texas debacle has been a long time coming. Decades of political preferences in Texas in favor of weather-dependent, intermittent “renewable energies” – solar and wind – have added 20 GW of capacity since 2015, while coal-fired power plants have been shut down and natural gas capacity has barely increased. From 2010 to 2019, more than $ 80 billion in federal grants was spent on wind and sun. An average of $ 1.5 billion is spent annually on government subsidies for renewable energy. A deregulated market that rewards power generation without needing reliable capacity ready to deliver power when needed has naturally tipped the field in favor of intermittent solar and wind power.
The standard answer from the renewable energy lobby is that fossil fuels also receive subsidies. The fact that wind gets 17 times and solar gets a staggering 75 times the tax support that fossil power generation gets per kilowatt hour is being lost in the rage of the culture wars between renewable energy advocates and their peers on the side of oil, gas and coal .
Texas therefore decided to lose reliable generation capacity while relying on sun and wind to keep up with electricity demand. For any graduate engineer, the increasing likelihood is evident that an event that combines very high demand with intermittent wind and solar power will result in blackouts. An observer, a former Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives, said, “The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter frost rather than the foreseeable summer heat waves in Texas.” It is no surprise that the power grids are in Western Europe and the UK, which have imposed policies forcing rapid growth in renewable energy capacity, are on the cutting edge.
Perhaps the simplest view of what happened is shown in the table below. It shows the change in fuel performance in Texas between January 18th and February 17th. Not only did coal and gas power hold up better than wind, which fell by over 90%, but gas turbine generators increased output by a massive 450%, which almost made up for the lack of wind. However, this was not enough to meet the increasing demand for electricity caused by the explosion in the Arctic. It takes chutzpah to claim that gas, coal and nuclear power were not operated at 100% of the expected potential, but “failed” even though the wind failed by almost 100%.
Texas power delivery change January 18 – February 17, 2021 at 12 noon US EIA
A highly consistent irony
For planners and politicians in developing countries, most of whom have signed the Paris Agreement (non-binding) and who are constantly thinking about the need for a “transition” from fossil fuels, the Texas debacle provides an ironic education about the precipitate reliance on diesel goes out to generators when the chips are down in the world’s richest country.
One of the first steps taken by Joe Biden, the first US “climate president”, was the resumption of the Paris Agreement. His international climate star, John Kerry, met with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to mark America’s re-entry barely days after the worst tragedy in Texas. Convinced that the earth has 9 years to avert the worst consequences of the “climate crisis” and “there is no counterfeiting in this”, Kerry urged the world’s major emitting countries, including China, India and Russia, “ really increase fossil fuel consumption and increase ambition to fight climate change. The irony is lost with Mr. Kerry, however. He is teaching poorer countries about the need for heightened ambitions to fight climate change, when it is precisely these ambitions that likely contributed to the tragic debacle in Texas.
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