Lax rules, natural gas blamed for blackouts
Federal energy officials rebuke Abbott’s claim that wind turbines were the culprit in disaster
Days after the February freeze crippled Texas’ power grid and left millions of people shivering in darkness, Gov. Greg Abbott went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to blame frozen wind turbines for the disaster.
“This shows how the Green New
Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.”
Federal energy officials this week rebuked Abbott’s claim, putting the blame on Texas’ lax energy regulations and the failure of the state’s natural gas system. The widespread blackouts affected more than 4.5 million Texans, including 1.4 million Houstonians, led to the deaths of more than 200 and helped cause billions of dollars in property damage.
Of the 1,045 power generating turbines that went offline during the winter storm, 604, or 58 percent, involved natural gas generators. These natural gas power plants had the capacity to produce 106,568 megawatts of power, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation’s power grids and natural gas pipelines. One megawatt is enough electricity to power 200 Texas homes on a hot summer day.
“Some political leaders used the crisis to bash renewable energy, blaming wind and solar power for the failure of the grid,” FERC Chairman Rich Glick said Thursday. “Well, (this) report makes it clear that the facts just don’t support this rhetoric.
“To be sure, all types of generation, including natural gas, coal, nuclear and wind, experienced problems due to the extreme cold and they all should have winterized facilities,” Glick added, but “traditional generation experienced substantial challenges, with natural gas-generating facilities accounting for more than half of all outages.”
A preliminary report published Thursday by FERC and the electricity reliability nonprofit North
American Reliability Corp. found that the two biggest factors contributing to power plants failing during the winter storm were the lack of weatherization of critical equipment at power plants and problems with Texas’ fuel supplies, particularly natural gas. Freezing and fuel issues accounted for three-quarters of the unplanned power plant failures in the Midwest and the South, including in Texas and Louisiana.
FERC said Texas regulators and power generators failed to sufficiently winterize their power plants, leading to frozen sensors, transmitters and wind turbines. The federal agency recommended that power plants and natural gas producers install temporary heaters, insulation and wind barriers to help prevent future freezing.
The second main culprit, FERC said, was the fuel supply to power plants. Natural gas producers temporarily shut down wells to prevent their equipment from freezing, while companies that continued to operate experienced frozen equipment at wellheads and gathering and processing facilities. Icy road conditions also made it difficult to get crews out to make repairs.
As temperatures fell, natural gas production in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana started to fall days before rolling blackouts began early on Feb. 15. Over the next five days, natural gas production declined by an estimated 20 billion cubic feet per day, leading to a 50 percent decline compared with the first week in February and the largest drop in U.S. natural gas output on record.
Texas natural gas trade groups have blamed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ rolling blackouts for the major drop in natural gas production, arguing that gas producers and pipelines couldn’t move their product to power plants because they lacked power.
FERC, however, said the majority of the production declines in North and West Texas, home to the Permian Basin, occurred before Feb. 15. Sixty percent of power plants affected by reductions of natural gas supply were knocked offline before rolling blackouts began, FERC said. A caveat: FERC’s report includes natural gas power plants from other electric grids that aren’t part of ERCOT, but were also affected by the winter storm.
Indeed, rolling blackouts also affected several natural gas production and processing facilities, most of which didn’t seek the permission of regulators and utilities to be exempted from emergency outages. This led to a cycle in which power outages knocked out natural gas production, which knocked out even more natural gas power plants supplying electricity to gas providers.
FERC, however, said it did not know how much of an effect freezing temperatures and rolling blackouts had on natural gas shortages because many gas facilities weren’t exempt from emergency power outages.
Although Texas has one of the nation’s largest supplies of natural gas in storage, the lack of power limited its withdrawal. FERC found that natural gas pipelines were only minimally affected by power outages, because most have backup power.
“We know there’s a very great interdependency in Texas, but also elsewhere, between natural gas reliability and electrical reliability, and we need to think about that some more,” Glick said. “And not only us, but I think other policymakers need to think about how to ensure greater reliability on the natural gas side.”
The Texas Oil and Gas Association, the state’s largest oil and gas trade group, said the Texas Legislature has already gone a long way in addressing many of the issues identified in the FERC report by passing Senate Bill 3, which mandated weatherization for power plants but not natural gas facilities. The trade group, which commissioned Austin research firm Enverus to conduct its own study on the winter storm, said power outages at natural gas facilities were a “predominant factor” behind the natural gas production declines during the freeze.
“ERCOT’s data confirmed fuel limitations were only 12 percent of the causation of lack of electricity from electric generators powered with natural gas,” TXOGA President Todd Staples said. “The Enverus report and ERCOT data confirm that the decline in natural gas production became significant only after power losses occurred, and again, it is well-documented that ample natural gas was available in storage. The Texas oil and natural gas industry looks forward to full implementation of Senate Bill 3, other legislative directives and evaluation of the FERC report that will strengthen the reliability of our electric grid.”
The Railroad Commission, which oversees Texas’ natural gas system, declined to comment.
Abbott, who receives large contributions from the oil and gas industry, did not respond to a request for comment.
Michael Webber, an energy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said there’s a lot of blame to go around for the failure of Texas’ power grid, but agreed with FERC that problems with the state’s natural gas system was one of the main culprits.
“Texas officials give a lot of cover to (natural) gas, but it failed this year,” Webber said. “We should quit giving a pass to gas.”