The fault in Texas
When the power went out
As I have spent my career in the energy business, and because I have two married children and young grandchildren in Houston and Austin, I watched with more than passing interest the events in Texas last week. A couple of observations and a conclusion came to mind as a result.
For starters, it typifies America today that someone has to be blamed, and blamed immediately, for outcomes caused by a 50-100-year storm event. I would suggest that exceedingly rare events cause exceedingly rare outcomes and, furthermore, that the widespread outages, given the conditions, were inevitable and the result of prior, and quite logical, decisions.
In other words, no one is to blame because that implies a misdeed or mistake. Neither happened in this case as I believe I can show. Also, now typical, is that opposite sides of the energy spectrum (traditional versus renewables) take the same fact set and draw different conclusions, i.e., wind energy was the cause, or natural gas/coal/nuclear power was the cause.
I think it is clear that both were at fault. In a fact-filled editorial on Feb. 18, The Wall Street Journal cited International Energy Agency (IEA) data and showed that wind turbines went down first (between Feb. 7 and Feb. 11, wind’s share of the state’s electricity generation fell to 8 percent from 42 percent). As a result, natural gas and coal-fired generating plants were brought up but covered the shortfall for only a couple of days before the temperature drop—into the teens and single digits—froze the process water in some of their systems and many of them went offline as well.
Nuclear generation never stops (except for planned maintenance and refueling), because it is too expensive to cycle up and down, but one of two generating units at the South Texas Project went down as the process water in its system also froze.
It is just common sense that renewables, because of intermittency and especially in severe winter weather, are going to be unpredictable/unreliable power sources until there is grid-level battery storage. Said another way, there has to be 24-hour generating backup to replace these sources when they go offline. The issue becomes when temperatures in our part of the world drop and stay in the teens and below, the traditional generators can go down as well. It has always been this way, and always will be, unless rate-payers are willing to pay to winterize these facilities.
Interestingly, while some of the traditional generators went down (and enough to be a cause of the outages), most did not. The EIA data reflects that when the blackouts began on Feb. 15, there were still 40,000 megawatts of thermal (natural gas, coal and nuclear) generating plants online (out of approximately 55,000 megawatts of capacity), but only approximately 5,000 megawatts of wind (out of approximately 30,000 megawatts of capacity).
So, while traditional generators proved, on balance, unreliable in these conditions, wind generators proved to be substantially more unreliable. There should be nothing controversial about this; it is simply the prolonged result of frozen precipitation on very large wind turbine blades.
As an aside, our company owned oil refineries in both Superior, Wis., and New Orleans, La. The plant in Superior (located on Lake Superior) rarely, if ever, went down in the winter because it was built to withstand extraordinarily cold weather. Meanwhile, in the very unusual occasions that temperatures reached and stayed in the teens in the New Orleans area, our plant would predictably freeze up and go down. It happened so infrequently it was never deemed necessary to address this issue.
So the conclusion that I draw is that unless we want to “socialize” the cost of winterizing the Southern power infrastructure by increasing consumer electricity rates, these types of outages will occur again if weather like this recurs.
So should we? My view is that because this is an extremely rare event (the system has enough excess capacity and is durable enough to be “up” in all but the most extraordinary of conditions) and because the outages, on average, lasted around three days (those of us in south Arkansas have certainly experienced longer after a severe ice storm), this would be an unwise policy decision.