Texas was warned to protect power plants
Same deficiencies noted after similar crisis in 2011
AUSTIN, Texas – Failing power plants, rolling blackouts and a spike in demand as Texas is hijacked by a harsh February winter snow storm: This was the scenario exactly a decade ago as blackouts rolled through Texas.
A postmortem at the time – including a key finding that state officials recommended but did not mandate winter protections for generating facilities – has renewed relevance as Texas is roiled by a record storm that has left millions without power for at least three days amid plunging temperatures.
Those 2011 findings, as well as reports from the state grid operators that generators and natural gas pipelines froze in this week’s storm and American-Statesman interviews with current and former utility executives and energy experts, suggest a light regulatory touch and cavalier operator approach involving winter protections of key industrial assets.
“You could take out ‘2011’ and pop in ‘2021,’ and there is going to be a lot of similarities” between the deficiencies in the grid found in the report 10 years ago and those plaguing it now, said Dave Tuttle, an Energy Institute research associate at the University of Texas.
Had the recommendations been followed, either voluntarily by power generators and transmission companies or because of mandates by regulators, many Texans probably would be a lot warmer now, Tuttle said.
“It’s not like the technology isn’t there” to keep electricity flowing during extremely low temperatures, he said. “There are people who live in a lot colder climates than we do” without losing power.
A federal report in summer 2011 found that state officials in 1989, after another cold snap caused outages, “issued a number of recommendations aimed at improving winterization on the part of the generators.”
“These recommendations were not mandatory, and over the course of time implementation lapsed,” said the August 2011 report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, titled “Report on Outages and Curtailments During the Southwest Cold Weather Event of February 1-5, 2011.”
The agency that oversees the state’s main power market, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has been getting the brunt of criticism for the system failure. Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders have called for investigations and hearings into its handling of the emergency.
But Tuttle said there’s plenty of blame to go around.
“It’s not just ERCOT – although ERCOT is going to get hammered over this,” he said.
ERCOT is regulated by the Public Utility Commission of Texas – a threemember panel appointed by the governor – as well as by the Legislature. In addition, power generation companies, transmission companies and retail utilities all have a hand in keeping electricity flowing in the state’s deregulated electricity market.
“10 years ago the PUC identified the incapacity to deal with extreme shifts in the weather and did nothing,” state Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, wrote Wednesday on Twitter.
The Statesman left messages with the Public Utility Commission, which regulates utilities, and the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates gas pipelines, asking about what the state requires for winter protections. The messages were not immediately returned.
Messages left by the Statesman with the Association of Electric Companies of Texas and the Texas Pipeline Association asking about winterization practices also were not immediately returned.
One coal plant executive who formerly worked in grid operations told the Statesman that the Public Utility Commission requires operators of generators to sign an affidavit confirming that facilities have been winterized.
“But it’s not like they say, ‘Here are one thousand things you need to do,’ ” said the executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was speaking about a regulatory agency.
The winter storm in February 2011 saw single-digit temperatures in parts of Texas.
More than 190 generating units in Texas faltered, leading to rolling blackouts affecting 3.2 million customers.
“Had ERCOT not acted promptly to shed load, it would very likely have suffered widespread, uncontrolled blackouts throughout the entire ERCOT Interconnection,” federal regulators concluded at the time, an assertion ERCOT operators are echoing today as they seek to answer criticism from Abbott and other politicians.
The federal officials also found that natural gas pipelines and production facilities were compromised by the weather.
“Generators and natural gas producers suffered severe losses of capacity despite having received accurate forecasts of the storm,” the 2011 report said. “Entities in both categories report having winterization procedures in place. However, the poor performance of many of these generating units and wells suggests that these procedures were either inadequate or were not adequately followed.”
On Wednesday, the coal plant executive and Joe Beal, a former general manager of the Lower Colorado River Authority – which operates coal and gas plants, transmission lines and has a hand as well in wind power – both said they suspected frozen valves on gas pipelines played a role in calamity.
“I remember that happening about 20 years ago in the Metroplex,” Beal said. A “valve operator froze up ... you see them in the country side where the pipe curves out of the ground with a valve and operator and then goes back under the ground.”
More broadly, investigations are sure to look at whether the system had enough capacity to handle the problems – just as investigators did in 2011.
“Reserves proved insufficient for the extraordinary amount of capacity that was lost during the event,” investigators found at the time.
Larson, the state representative, said Wednesday that “the power generators asked for a capacity market to build more natural gas power plants during the heatwave of 2011. PUC did nothing. Bad decision.”
The problem, Mark Rose, also a former LCRA and Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative general manager, said that extra capacity was opposed by large industrial consumers of electricity and led to constant conflict at the PUC.
Those big industrial players were looking for the cheapest possible rate – and building more capacity costs money.
On Wednesday, ERCOT CEO Bill Magness dismissed the idea that moving to a capacity market would have changed the outcome.
“A capacity market wouldn’t have changed the weather,” he said. “There isn’t a capacity shortage. It was a problem of capacity being knocked out by an extraordinary event.”
Meanwhile, an agency called the Texas Reliability Entity is charged with ensuring that the Texas grid lives up to federal reliability standards, although it has no role in overseeing ERCOT’s operation of the state’s competitive wholesale and retail electricity markets.
A Texas Reliability Entity representative wasn’t immediately available for comment Wednesday.
Chrysta Castañeda, an oil and gas attorney who ran unsuccessfully last year for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, agreed with Tuttle that there is no shortage of culprits in the ongoing failure of the Texas power grid. The railroad commission regulates the state’s oil and gas industry.
But Castañeda, a Democrat, singled out in particular an “egregious” communication failure on the part of ERCOT in terms of the making people aware of the danger of the coming cold snap. She also cited what she called an anti-regulation mindset among many in the state’s Republican leadership resulting in lax oversight overall.
“There are insufficient standards in place to prevent this event,” she said. But “raising the standards costs money, and individual (generators and transmission companies), if they don’t have the incentives to do so, will avoid spending that money.”
Legislative hearings and investigations have already been announced.