Name: Texas' Power Grid Trouble is Far From Over
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What did we learn from the failure of the Texas power grid—and how can use these lessons to build more resilient energy systems?

Why it means we need to rethink our aging energy infrastructure throughout the U.S.

What did we learn from the Texas power grid crisis earlier this year and how can we build more resilient energy systems?

Texas' Power Grid Trouble is Far From Over

Why it means we need to rethink our aging energy infrastructure throughout the U.S.

Planet Earth

Texas' Power Grid Trouble is Far From OverPublished: March 22, 2021Narrator: Texans are still reeling from the power outage crisis earlier this year.Paula Gold-Williams: All the suffering and the terrible experience that people have is just heartwrenching. And we never want this to happen again.Narrator: But many experts see what happened as a sign of things to come—and not just in Texas.Gold-Williams: Let’s use this as a as a huge a huge example of what we don’t want as a community, as as a nation.Narrator: More on that in a minute. First, Texas. To unpack what happened here, let’s take things step by step. First, freezing Arctic air, usually pinned way farther north by a ring of rapid wind called the jet stream, made its way southward, plunging much of North America into a deep freeze that engulfed Texas.Michael Webber: It was colder than normal for longer than normal, and it affected every single county in the state.Gold-Williams: There are some winters where we never hit freezing. In this case, the challenge we had was the consistency day after day after day, no warming up, no getting to above freezing.Narrator: Texas is powered roughly half by natural gas, 20% by coal, another 20% by wind and solar, and 10% by nuclear. With summer temperatures regularly hitting 90+, even 100+ degrees Fahrenheit, Texans plans for heat. The state doesn’t design its power plants and natural gas system to work in super cold conditions.Gold-Williams: We are constantly designing our plants to take heat off... ventilation, exhaust systems. There's a lot of cooling that happens with recycled water. And you're trying to keep that plant as cool as possible. And in the north, you’ll find power plants fully encased with the permanent structure, brick, steel, all the things that they need. They will also create permanent coverings for those exposed lines. And we just don’t have that structure.Narrator: Most power plants use heat to drive turbines to create electricity. Texas temporarily winterizes those plants each year. Through insulation, portable heaters, scaffolding. But when the bitterly cold weather descended in mid-February...Greeshma Gadikota: A lot of the infrastructure for delivering electricity just froze.Narrator: Not just for delivering electricity, but also the equipment for MAKING electricity froze.Webber: We had freeze offs in the natural gas system that actually froze at the wellhead and clogged the wellhead, or froze in the equipment or the gathering lines, the pipelines. We couldn’t get the gas to the power plants. We have four nuclear reactors in Texas. One of them turned off because of a frozen water pump.Narrator: A pump that’d usually help circulate water—water that gets heated to form steam and drive the turbines.Webber: We have several coal plants that turned off because of frozen equipment at the coal plants. Along with some snow on solar panels and then some of the wind turbines had ice. So we had outages throughout the system.Narrator: These outages turned off electricity in different parts of the state, including sections of the natural gas system that are electrically operated—pumps, anti-freeze injection systems, etc. And that led to the shutdown of even more power plants. It became a set of cascading failures.Webber: So we have a water problem—freezing water, become a gas problem, become a power problem, become a bigger gas problem, become a bigger power problem, become a water problem and a humanitarian crisis.Narrator: At the same time, across the state, demand was surging as frigid Texans were trying to heat their homes. 6 out of every 10 homes in the state use electricity for heating. The lack of supply, combined with the spike in demand, meant trouble for the grid—the network used to deliver electricity to consumers. To avoid massive equipment failures, parts of the system are programmed to trip off if they get overloaded. Which can happen when a lot of people suddenly demand more electricity than normal all at once.Webber: We had to bring things back into balance or the whole grid would have gone down. And once the whole grid goes down, it takes weeks or months to bring it back up. And we were within seconds to minutes of a complete collapse.Narrator: That’s because when demand far outstrips supply, basically when things fall too far out of balance, it can trip all the power plants, causing a systemwide blackout. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which administers Texas’ grid and serves about 85% of the state, leapt into action.Gold-Williams: ERCOT is like an air traffic controller. They can see everything. We rely on ERCOT to tell us when they think it's going to get really bad.Narrator: And this situation was really bad. Power had to be turned off immediately. Not with rolling blackouts. But with controlled blackouts that descended on certain parts of the state and lasted for a couple, and in some cases, several days.Webber: So some circuits are on and some are off, where we turned them off and kept them off.Narrator: Low-income communities tend to be more vulnerable in a crisis like this due to poor infrastructure and fewer resources to facilitate recovery. One of the challenges was that when it comes to its grid, Texas is a land unto itself.Webber: In the United States, there are three grids: east, west and Texas. Texas happens to have an independent grid for a variety of reasons.Narrator: Like being untethered by federal regulations. And the fact that, unlike most other states, Texas can generate enough power within its borders to be self-sufficient.Gold-Williams: We generate power, we transmit it, we distribute it, and we serve customers.Webber: But it means if things go wrong, we have trouble importing power from neighboring states. So we can’t lean on our neighbor the way most states can. We’re really on our own when it comes to dealing with tough weather. And so it’s all great until it doesn’t work and then things can fall apart quickly.Gadikota: So what happened in Texas is really, it’s not just about Texas. It’s about aging infrastructure. It’s about the need to rethink our energy infrastructure, the need to build in resilience in response to a changing climate in many, many different parts of the world. The risks 20, 30, 40 years ago are different from the risks that we face now.Webber: Right now, we’re building our infrastructure for yesterday’s weather, not tomorrow’s weather. The next hundred years will be different. We know this, that the weather events will be more extreme and more frequent, which means hotter and colder, wetter and drier. So we have to deal with this and design for that.Gold-Williams: We need reliability and we need affordability while we work on making the environment better. We need to do outage management, but by a whole different way, so people aren’t out all day while we still try to prevent a blackout.Narrator: Now, what happened in Texas, while rare, was not unanticipated. A decade ago, in February 2011, a winter storm blew through Texas, leading to rolling blackouts across the state.Webber: And that led to a major report with their official assessment and their recommendations. Recommendations such as winterization, winterizing our plants so they work better when it’s cold, just like they do in northern climates like in Minnesota or the Northeast.Narrator: Winterization could cost perhaps tens of billions of dollars.Webber: Implementing the solutions should take years to do. A decade was enough. And it looks like we didn’t do it very much or certainly not enough. Now we go to 2021. This will match Hurricane Harvey or even be more in terms of damage.Narrator: The damage caused by the February freeze is expected to cost Texas about $130 billion, well above the estimated cost of winterizing.Webber: We can do other things like consider connecting to other grids so we can get reliability benefits from other states. We could diversify the fuel supply so we’re not so reliant on fossil fuels. We could integrate other technologies that let us have either more resilience to bring the grid back faster or to prevent the collapse in the first place. And then make sure the solutions are implemented in an equitable way.Gadikota: There have been calls for upgrading grid level infrastructure over the course of the past decade in a place like Texas. The question really is: why weren’t we prepared to handle such a catastrophe?Webber: We’re an example of what can happen if you ignore reality. If the most energy-abundant region of the world can run short on energy, it can happen anywhere. So climate science can be integrated into our energy planning to make the energy systems perform better. That’s what we need to do.

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Texas' Power Grid Trouble is Far From Over

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Support Provided By

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