CLIMATE CRISES
Country’s two largest states manage power differently, but both proved woefully unprepared for climate disasters
Texas storms, California heat underscore weather challenges.
In California, wildfires and heat waves in recent years forced utilities to shut off power to millions of homes and businesses. Now Texas is learning that deadly winter storms and intense cold can do the same.
The country’s two largest states have taken very different approaches to managing their energy needs: Texas deregulated aggressively, letting the free market flourish, while California embraced environmental regulations. Yet the two states are confronting the same ominous reality: They may be woefully unprepared for the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters caused by climate change.
Blackouts in Texas and California have revealed that power plants can be strained and knocked offline by the kind of extreme cold and hot weather that climate scientists have said will become more common as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.
The problems in Texas and California highlight the challenge the Biden administration will face in modernizing the electricity system to run entirely on wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other zero-emission technologies by 2035 — a goal that President
Joe Biden set during the 2020 campaign.
The federal government and energy businesses may have to spend trillions of dollars to harden electricity grids against the threat posed by climate change and to move away from the fossil fuels responsible for the warming of the planet in the first place. These are not new ideas. Scholars have long warned that U.S. electricity grids, which are run regionally, will come under increasing strain and needed major upgrades.
“We really need to change our paradigm, particularly utilities, because they are becoming much more vulnerable to disaster,” Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, said about blackouts in Texas and California. “They need to always think about literally the worst-case scenario, because the worst case scenario is going to happen.”
In California and Texas, conservatives have blamed renewable energy for blackouts, even though energy experts, grid managers and utility executives have said outages at solar and wind farms played a smaller role than poor planning and problems with the natural gas supply and other power sources.
That Texas and California have been hardest hit makes clear that simplistic ideological explanations are often wrong. Texas, for example, has relied on market forces to balance its electric grid. If there is not enough supply, the price for electricity in its wholesale market shoots up, which is meant to encourage companies to produce more power and businesses and consumers to use less. California also has a power market, but it requires power producers to maintain excess capacity that can be called upon in emergencies. Yet both systems buckled in extreme conditions.
The common theme in the two states is that many traditional power plants are much more sensitive to temperature changes than the utility industry has acknowledged, said Jay Apt, co-director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center.
“Coal plants and gas plants have problems in both heat and cold,” said Apt, who is also a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Last August, several power plants fired by natural gas stopped generating electricity as Californians were cranking up air conditioners because equipment at the plants malfunctioned in the hot weather. Other plants were down for maintenance, which many experts found odd, given that electricity demand typically peaks in the late summer.
In Texas last week, many natural gas plants went offline or had to scale back operations because their equipment froze. Others could not generate as much power as they normally do because the pipelines that deliver gas to them were frozen or were not receiving enough gas from fields in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, where operations were also hampered by below-freezing temperatures.
In addition, Apt pointed out that the United States had experienced five major cold snaps since 2011, including the polar vortex in 2014 that led to the shutdown of almost onequarter of available electricity in the nation’s largest energy market, PJM, which serves the mid-Atlantic region. At some plants, coal mounds became unusable because they froze.
“These kinds of cold snaps are not particularly rare,” Apt said. “A black swan event — an unknown unknown — it wasn’t.”