Texas blackouts show the power grid isn’t ready for climate change
When a few hundred thousand California homes and businesses lost power for several hours last summer, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wrote that the Golden State “is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.”
What Texans have experienced over the last few days was far worse.
More than 4 million homes and businesses saw their electricity shut off as a powerful cold snap sent temperatures into the single digits, driving up demand for heating while simultaneously freezing much of the energy infrastructure that would normally keep people warm. Rolling blackouts began in the wee hours of Monday morning and continued into Tuesday evening.
At least 20 people were reported dead in stormrelated incidents in the eastern half of the country, including several in Texas – and experts said it was all but certain that the death toll would rise. Harris County, home to Houston, reported hundreds of cases of carbon monoxide poisoning as people tried to stay warm by using portable generators or running their cars indoors.
But for all the differences between the events in
Texas and California’s more limited rolling blackouts last year, there’s a common lesson: Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more severe as the climate crisis worsens. And the U.S. power grid is not prepared to handle the hotter heat storms, more frigid cold snaps and stronger hurricanes of a changing planet.
“It’s gonna be bad,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston.
Adding to the challenge, efforts to harden existing infrastructure against extreme weather won’t be enough.
Most of the country’s power comes from coal, oil and natural gas – the very fuels driving climate change. The grid of the future will need to be powered primarily by zero-carbon electricity sources, such as solar and wind – and rebuilding the grid from top to bottom, without further disrupting energy supplies, will be a delicate balancing act.
California and Texas offer a preview of the risks, and potential solutions.
In the Lone Star State, some skeptics of climate change blamed the rolling blackouts on frozen wind turbines. The Wall Street Journal editorial board used the emergency to argue that the nation’s power grid “is becoming less reliable due to growing reliance on wind and solar, which can’t provide power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the power grid for most of the state, told a different story.
ERCOT data showed that wind farms generated less electricity overall than the grid operator would have expected during a cold snap, although at times they exceeded expectations. But the power sources that underperformed on the largest scale were coal and gas plants that had equipment freeze over or couldn’t get sufficient fuel on site as drilling operations and pipelines struggled to work properly. At one point, 34 gigawatts of power were offline – more than a third of the state’s generating capacity.
Wholesale electricity prices jumped by more than 10,000% Monday as power supplies grew scarce.
“If we believe climate change is fueling these events, we can’t just keep doing more of the same, or we’ll be in the same boat in the not-too-distant future,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.
It’s a boat Texans who lost power over the last 48 hours have no desire to be in again.
In Austin, Lezli Regis,
42, was trapped by the storm in her one-bedroom apartment with her 9-yearold son Theo and their three cats, all surrounding roads impassable. She tried to go to work Saturday at the veterinary clinic she manages but had to turn around. She lost power and hot water at the start of the storm, and most of the contents of her refrigerator spoiled.
By Tuesday, she was running out of food.
“We might start eating cat food, because there’s literally nothing else,” she said.