Deep in the heart of Texas, residents, businesses and factories are reeling from a recent winter storm and the resulting blackouts. What caused these widespread power outages? Did the technology fail? Was it poorly designed? Were regulations violated? Was it about money? Was it the result of frozen wind turbines? Or was this just a “perfect storm” caused by a highly improbable weather event that’s unlikely to recur anytime soon? Engineering.com takes a comprehensive look at the contributing factors and offers a few corrective measures.
Texas Grid
The saga began in 1935, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, giving the U.S. government the responsibility to oversee the sale of electricity across state lines. Abundant in fossil fuels and inclined toward independence, Texas never thought it would need to purchase electricity from other states and preferred to avoid federal regulations, so the state opted to go it alone and operate its own grid within state lines. Eventually, the U.S., along with parts of Canada and Mexico, ended up with four independent power grids: Quebec, Eastern, Western and Texas.
In 1970, the nongovernmental Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) was created to maintain the grid according to national standards. ERCOT itself is overseen by the Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas; federal regulators have no jurisdiction over either entity. ERCOT has four primary responsibilities:
- Maintain system reliability
- Facilitate a competitive wholesale market
- Facilitate a competitive retail market
- Ensure open access to transmission
How Does Texas Generate Electricity?
When you think of Texas, you think of oil, but “liquid gold” is too costly to compete with other sources of electricity these days. Still, more than 60 percent of the power generated in Texas comes from fossil fuels, primarily natural gas and coal. Wind power is steadily growing in Texas, satisfying almost one-fourth of the state’s electricity needs.
What Caused the Blackouts?
While some have been quick to blame wind power for Texas’ power woes, the majority of the state’s wind turbines continued to produce energy throughout the bitter cold. Two-thirds of the state’s failed power sources were gas, coal and nuclear power plants. To paraphrase a great song, wind turbines kept on turning; gas didn’t keep on burning. (Apologies to John Fogerty.)
While it’s true that some Texas wind turbines shut down due to the weather, that’s not an inherent flaw of wind power. Wind turbines are still spinning reliably in the Midwest, where temperatures have been significantly colder than anything Texas has ever experienced. In fact, here’s a station in Antarctica that’s powered entirely by wind and solar power:
The wind turbines that failed in Texas did so for the exact same reason that many gas-fired power plants failed: the lack of winterization. The technology exists and it’s affordable; ERCOT authorities chose not to employ it. (We’ll cover wind turbine de-icing technology in a future article.)
But that’s just the generation side; there were also issues with the supply and distribution of natural gas. Many of Texas’ gas pipelines froze or lost power—again, due to a lack of winterization technology that was deemed too costly for a state that rarely experiences extremely cold temperatures. (How rarely? We’ll get to that.) The rest of the U.S. power grid has regulations that require utilities to winterize their equipment; Texas, by keeping its independence from federal authorities, has exempted itself from those regulations.
On the supply side, many natural gas power plants were unable to obtain fuel, for a variety of reasons. First, because of the state’s abundance of gas wells, readily available fuel has always been taken for granted. That turned out to be a poor assumption in this case, as the extreme cold made it difficult to extract gas from the wells. This, in turn, caused a shortage of natural gas, which is also used as heating fuel. Second, the cold weather caused an increased demand for heat, further straining gas supplies. Third, many power plants don’t store gas on-site, relying instead on pipelines to deliver a steady supply of gas on demand. Authorities were forced to regulate the distribution of natural gas to give priority to hospitals, fire stations, water treatment facilities and other critical operations, leaving power plants out in the cold, so to speak.
“Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” said Michael Webber, professor of Energy Resources at the University of Texas at Austin.
According to ERCOT President Bill Magness, Texas was moments away from catastrophic extended blackouts. The executive credited ERCOT grid operators who are responsible for the day-to-day power distribution for averting a much worse disaster. And while those accolades are well-deserved, saying that “it could have been worse” offers little comfort to those affected, nor does it prevent future occurrences. Kudos to the operators who made the tough decisions amid the crisis, but that doesn’t absolve the authorities of their decision to prioritize cost over reliability.
“This was a total failure by ERCOT,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday. “These are the experts. These are engineers in the power industry. These aren’t bureaucrats or whatever the case may be. These are specialists, and government has to rely upon on these specialists to be able to deliver in these types of situations.” The governor is correct in laying the responsibility on ERCOT, but pointing the finger at engineers and specialists is disingenuous. Experts have, more than once, advised ERCOT to prepare for an event like this; ERCOT executives chose to ignore the experts.
Hindsight Is … 2011?
Texans may remember the Alamo, but some appear to have forgotten about the extreme cold spells they’ve had in recent history. In fact, the Southwest region of the United States, including Texas, experienced extended frigid periods in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, and now 2021—that’s eight times in the past 40 years.
After a deep freeze affected the Southwestern U.S. in 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a report that recommended, among other things, more accessible reserves of natural gas and better winterization efforts. The report also noted the competition for natural gas between electricity and heat, and—while not making specific recommendations—urged grid operators to explore solutions.
FERC’s economic analysis determined that the cost of winterization shouldn’t be an issue. In spite of that, some power companies find it more economical to simply shut down a plant and lose sales during temperature extremes rather than invest in winterization technology that is rarely used. The people responsible for that decision need to think beyond quarterly profits and consider the fact that mission-critical technology is worth the added expense. Speaking of which ...
The Economic Impact
I recently spoke with an engineer in the automotive industry. He told me that one of his company’s plants in Texas had to shut down completely because of the blackouts, impacting the production lines of major car manufacturers. The lack of electricity also forced several semiconductor plants in Texas to freeze production, causing a ripple effect all the way up the supply chain. One has to wonder how much money will be lost as a result of not heeding the warnings and recommendations that have been reiterated over the past decade.
How Can Texas Prevent Future Grid Failures?
Okay, so now that we know the factors that contributed to the problem, how can Texas prevent future occurrences?
From a weather standpoint, authorities must acknowledge the reality of the climate and winterize their generation, transmission and distribution equipment. Money spent on infrastructure pays dividends in the long run.
Microgrids offered a modicum of relief to some Texans, but they make up a tiny fraction of the state’s total generating capacity. Distributed energy resources, including microgrids and more renewable energy, need to be a part of the larger grid structure to ensure resilience.
Texas would be wise to consider joining the rest of the Union by voluntarily connecting to the Eastern or Western grid and adhering to regulations that could very well have prevented this debacle in the first place.
As a last resort, the federal government could intervene and demand that Texas follow federal regulations or risk losing federal relief money when the Texas grid fails due to its being unregulated. After all, if you build a house and don’t follow building codes, you can’t expect the insurance company to pay a claim when defective wiring causes a fire.