Green energy not to blame for Texas power outage
In his column on the freezing temperatures and resulting power outages in Texas last week, Rex Murphy argued that the overzealous concern progressives have for global warming is pushing us toward dangerous green investments (Hurling Public Money at Renewables is Dangerous, Rex Murphy, Feb. 18). Environmentalists, he argued, have been “harassing everyone from schoolchildren to government officials for the near 30 years” with an “alarmist narrative.”
Our false alarm, according to Murphy, has led to menacing political interference in North America’s fossil-based energy infrastructure. He cites the failure of Texas green energy in last week’s severe winter weather as the latest example of policy-makers “hurling vast sums of public money on renewable energy, (which) is not only a folly, but dangerous.” But is he right that Texas’ winter misery, the failure of its power grid and the boil-water advisories in some parts of the state is the fault of green energy and its reckless proponents?
Last week in Texas, wind power performed comparatively well relative to the winter prediction models developed by the ironically named Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the entity that operates the majority of the state’s power grid. Its own automated reporting immediately revealed that half of natural gas production was off-line when the rolling blackouts began. Some wind power was out due to freezing, but in total, less than 10 per cent of Texas’ winter power capacity (seven gigawatts) was expected to come from wind and solar. On the other hand, 66 per cent (56 gigawatts) was supposed to come from gas.
Much of the state’s thermoelectric generators failed. A nuclear power plant went down, partially, then about half the state’s natural gas generators failed. Most failed not because they couldn’t operate, but because they ran out of fuel.
Pipelines and gas production facilities froze. Almost all of the grid’s surge capacity comes from natural gas, so when the supply of gas runs dry, the system has no ability to meet spikes in demand. How could this be?
Federal regulators have a rule that energy infrastructure must be built to a winterized standard. Texas operates its own grid, partly out of pride, but also because energy companies with the ear of politicians don’t want to have to listen to federal regulators. Former governor Rick Perry is already appealing to Texans’ pride, but really shilling for his corporate and political benefactors, and being laughed at for suggesting that avoiding federal rules is worth the cost of watching Texans freeze in the dark.
The windmills in Texas are not winterized, as they are in my hometown in southern Ontario and everywhere else in the United States, including neighbouring states like Oklahoma and New Mexico. Natural gas pipelines do not freeze in Edmonton or Alaska. The nuclear power plant failed because of frozen cooling lines that are not housed indoors.
Texas also does not store much natural gas, because prodigious ground reserves can be pumped on demand. But that system failed, too. Natural gas soared from a few bucks to a record US$1,000 per MMBTU, but even at that price, they still could not deliver enough of it to electric plants in order to meet demand.
Texas’ energy independence also means that there is limited interconnectivity to grids to the east and west, so when the state’s generation
failed, we couldn’t import power properly, either.
Texas didn’t go down because of green energy, it did so because no one planned to deal with a winter storm, even though this happened in 1989, and again in 2011. It happened because it is a highly deregulated, privatized market that does not incentivize investment in winter resilience. It was made all that much worse by the fact that corporate political influence shields private energy infrastructure from the federal standards that mandate it.
The system allows energy companies to save on investment, and the public to save a few cents on their electricity bills, but those savings all get wiped out when a massive disruption, like we saw last week, causes widespread outages and insanely high prices that people are forced to pay so they don’t freeze to death.
Consumers who were fortunate enough to have power flowing during the peak of the crisis, and whose electric bills are tethered to open market prices (an estimated 25 per cent of households), are now receiving shocking four-figure bills. Before the power was even restored, it was announced that the price of electricity would be going up for everyone in the coming year to recoup the costs. It would be more correct to say that the cost of a failed gamble is being passed on to consumers.
Yet Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans are attacking green energy, in order to deflect from any discussion about why the system failed and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Rex Murphy picked up their talking points — likely in a warm house with reliable, regulated power in frozen Canada — and recycled them for a domestic audience, understandably eager to believe that our climate challenges are overblown and that the solutions do more harm than good. In reality, however, the reason that Texas is now experiencing such severe winter storms is because climate change has made polar vortex disruptions more common, and more severe.
With new optimism for constructive change, and North American green energy plans surely to be discussed when U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday, it would be to our advantage to deal in facts.
THE COST OF A FAILED GAMBLE IS BEING PASSED ON TO CONSUMERS.