Gather evidence on blackout without an agenda or ideology
COVID-19 killed half a million Americans in less than a year. Blackouts left four million Texas homes without electricity on the coldest four nights in decades. Thirteen million Texans were left without running, potable water.
Poet William Butler Yeats had seen something similar in 1919 following World War I and the Spanish flu and wrote “The Second Coming.”
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Today, provocateurs are stoking division and hatred with disinformation. Most of us are scrambling to explain what went wrong. Yet others see nothing more than an inconvenient anomaly. Then, there are those who want to burn it all down.
To recover, restore and improve our lives, businesses and economies, we must move with deliberation and humility, two things our culture does not seem to value at the moment.
Our society is built on energy, and millions of Texans, who had never heard of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or the people on the Public Utility Commission, have learned what happens when “things fall apart.”
We need to learn why 185 power plants tripped offline in a matter of hours. The breadth of the failure suggests a catastrophic fault in our system. We presume our generators were not prepared for such a winter storm, but we don’t know all the facts.
Texas regulators’ light touch and the state’s independence from national interconnections were supposed to be features of our system, not bugs. Would weatherization and expanding our capacity to import and export energy solve our problems? Maybe.
Others believe the fault lies with our wholesale electricity market, where wind and solar generators bolstered by federal tax credits can offer free electricity and still make a profit.
Most days, low wholesale prices are less than what it costs a fossil fuel plant to generate power. Coal, nuclear and natural gas generation facilities rely on a few hot days in the summer and a few cold days in the winter when prices spike to make their profits.
Fossil fuel advocates want Texas lawmakers to guarantee them a profit by barring more renewables or providing subsidies. Some natural gas plants want to get paid to stand by, whether they generate electricity or not; something called a capacity market.
Some on the left would throw out the entire competitive market and return to regulated utilities as we had during the 20th century. Governments grant a monopoly to one company to operate power plants, string wires and deliver electricity for a profit margin set by politicians. Consumers pay a dictated price and have no choices.
Hopefully, state and federal public hearings will reveal precisely who failed to generate power and why, so we can make sure we’re addressing the real problem. But also, hopefully, we will consider new technologies such as offshore wind or batteries along transmission lines to provide emergency power.
I find my personal experience analogous to this larger debate. The pipes under my home froze in 2011 but did not burst. When I looked underneath my recently purchased house back then, I recognized that I needed to weatherize. Of course, I didn’t, figuring I would just trickle water if it ever got that cold again.
The latest freeze burst pipes in nine places and cracked the valve on my water heater. Now half the pipes are uninsulated, and I have a mix of copper and plastic PEX pipes and numerous patches. Do I upgrade all my pipes to freeze-resistant PEX or go back to traditional copper? How much insulation do I add?
More succinctly, do I make a significant investment that will last 50 years or hope the duct tape holds? The larger societal debate is not just about electricity, water or public health.
Texans’ innocence has been drowned by one catastrophe after another, and “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Bad people are spreading misleading statistics, willfully ignoring reality, and lying about rivals.
Some are leveraging our failures to sow distrust and denounce our democratic and capitalist systems.
The anarchy Yeats identified led to the Great Depression and World War II. But if we can hold the center, we can evade a similar fate. If we can use our intellect to gather and analyze evidence without agenda or ideology, anarchy will not be “loosed upon the world.”
Turning scientific and engineering conversations into partisan standoffs does not make anything better. We have neglected our shared life-support systems for too long; we should not be surprised when things fall apart.