Will Texas ever listen and fix power grid?
As a federal report points out, some problems still aren’t fixed — and winter is approaching.
Ten years ago, Texas’ power grid failed to the point of blackouts. Temperatures dropped well below freezing for several days. Pipes and water lines froze at dozens of power plants. Wind turbine blades iced over. More than 4 million customers lost power.
Six months later, federal energy officials released a 357page report detailing what went wrong — that power plants and natural gas producers had failed to adequately weatherize facilities — and outlining how Texas could avoid another winter disaster.
Texas didn’t listen. And you know the rest of the story.
Ten years later, another winter storm swept across the South and Midwest, causing the largest forced power outage in the nation’s history, knocking out 61,800 megawatts across the region, killing at least 210 people and leaving more than 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses — including 1.4 million in the Houston area — without power for three days in freezing temperatures.
Last week, the same federal agencies that tried to warn us the first time the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Reliability Corp. — released preliminary findings from the latest disaster.
Once again, the agencies recommended that the power plants and natural gas producers protect critical equipment from freezing temperatures, update power generators that experience freeze-related outages and compensate generators to recoup weatherization costs.
The Groundhog’s Day time loop is complete. Now the question is, how many times does Texas have to get hit over the head with a federal report before the state finally takes the necessary steps to safeguard its electric grid? FERC Chairman Rich Glick succinctly underscored the state’s failure: If Texas followed the agency’s guidance a decade ago, lives would have been saved.
“I cannot, and will not, allow this to become yet another report that serves no purpose other than to gather dust on the shelf,” Glick said while presenting the agency’s findings.
Of course, FERC’s 31-page report and dozens of recommendations can go only as far as the state is willing to take them. The report recommends that power generators identify and protect cold-weather critical components, retrofit existing generators to operate in cold weather and conduct annual unit-specific cold weather preparedness training. Generator owners and operators should be forced to provide greater specificity about available power capacity leading up to extreme weather events. It even calls on Congress to determine which entity has authority over natural gas pipeline reliability, after finding that natural gas generators accounted for 58 percent of the state’s power outages.
The Texas Legislature’s initial actions on commonsense reforms this spring appear to have already tackled some of these problems. They mandated weatherization of facilities — though not all facilities and not with substantial penalties for those who don’t comply. Lawmakers also established a statewide emergency alert system, and they passed provisions aimed at improving industry communication and fixing basic gaps in the system, such as making sure natural gas facilities won’t have their own power cut during a crisis.
And yet, there is a larger structural problem that appears unlikely to be fixed anytime soon. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s main power grid operator, has resisted connecting with the nation’s two other power grids. The most damning finding in FERC’s report was that ERCOT, unlike neighboring power authorities in the South and Midwest, did not have the ability to import thousands of megawatts from the Eastern Interconnection, which links suppliers and customers east of the Rocky Mountains. The two other power authorities impacted by February’s storm were able to transfer power through their many transmission lines with the Eastern Interconnection, which helped to “alleviate their generation shortfalls” during the storm, according to the FERC report.
We’d like to feel comforted by Glick’s reassurances that this time around will be different, but it’s unclear how FERC’s many recommendations will even be enforced. After all, this is a grid system designed to fly under the radar. For decades, the state has kept its flow of power in-state. ERCOT controls both wholesale and retail sales of power while skirting federal oversight. Texas’ hallowed status as a regional Goliath of energy production and consumption has only reinforced its autonomy.
Yet that independence hasn’t made the grid any more reliable. ERCOT is structured in a way that power generators — be it natural gas, wind, coal, nuclear or solar — get paid only for the amount of power they generate. Rather than pay power producers to ensure that a cushion of power is available when it’s most needed, ERCOT has refused to do this because it would raise electricity rates for customers. After the storm forced more than 1.8 million CenterPoint Energy ratepayers in Houston to pay a $1.14 billion natural gas bill the utility racked up when it was forced to buy energy at astronomical prices, customers across the state should be asking if this trade-off is worth it.
Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which oversees ERCOT, waxed poetic in the Houston Chronicle recently about how well the grid performed during the peak summer months. One would hope so. There’s nothing abnormal or unexpected about a hot Texas summer.
But as long as Texas refuses to make the major changes long called for by federal regulators, all we can do is hope that Texas’ good fortune holds. That’s not so comforting. Winter is coming. And no one can say for sure that Texas is ready.