It’s historically cold in Texas. It’s historically snowy in Texas. There are historic power outages in Texas.
In Abilene, no water is coming through the city’s pipes.
In San Angelo, toxic chemicals were discovered in the pipes last week, even before the cold and storms hit.
Here in Austin, nearly half of Austin Energy customers are without power, and in many cases have been consistently without power for more than 24 hours now.
Homes are not insulated for historic cold. Pipes are not insulated for historic cold. Many people are at significant risk of freezing to death. Many people are without water. The damages from frozen pipes are going to be catastrophic for many.
What happened?
To begin, this exact thing (a legitimate power shortage, as opposed to outages driven by downed lines and the like) isn’t something all that likely to happen in other parts of the country. There are three power grids in the Lower 48: one for the eastern states, one for the western states, and one for Texas. This “Texplainer” from 2011 in the Texas Tribune explains the highlights: El Paso, the upper Panhandle, and part of East Texas are all serviced by the national grids, but the rest of Texas is serviced by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which was established fifty years ago to manage Texas’s grid. ERCOT does have three ties to Mexico and two ties to the eastern-state grid, but it’s largely its own body, for the sake of avoiding federal regulation, meaning while it can buy power from its southern and northeastern neighbors, it evidently can’t buy enough (and it can’t buy if they’re facing their own wintry hardships and won’t sell, as is reportedly the case). ERCOT has failed.
Why ERCOT has failed is another matter. You may have seen stories going around about wind output being at fault as turbines have been halted by massive coatings of ice and snow, but per Dan Woodfin, an ERCOT senior director, that’s not the biggest problem. Only 13% of the outages can be attributed to wind shutdowns, and wind generation, which is always relatively low here in the winter, exceeded ERCOT’s daily forecast through Saturday and Sunday.
The bigger problems are these:
Frozen Equipment
Wind falls in here, to be sure, but the problem’s happening at coal plants, too, and at natural gas plants, and at nuclear facilities and solar facilities. Instruments are freezing. Instruments are failing. Power is not being produced.
Why? It’s possible an alternative explanation will arrive, but the presumption is that just as houses aren’t winterized to a degree that can handle this, power plants aren’t winterized to that degree either. And evidently precautions weren’t taken to the degree necessary at the number of plants necessary to make it work.
Higher Demand
This piece of the problem is twofold. There’s the production side of things: Because so many furnaces and water heaters run on gas, less is available to go to gas-powered power plants. There’s the consumption side of things: More electricity is needed to keep buildings warm. More gas is needed in homes, causing shortages of fuel for some producers. More electricity is needed in homes, causing shortages of electricity for everyone.
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When will this end? The latest from ERCOT isn’t promising. Wind, solar, and thermal generation are picking up, but no timetable is being given for when the entire 90% of the state serviced by the grid will be back online. Meanwhile, at least here in Austin (I haven’t done a deep dive of any sort, and to be clear, I have no reason to believe the situation is worse or better in Austin than it is in the rest of the state), temperatures aren’t supposed to climb above freezing until tomorrow morning.
There are warming centers in two locations in the city, but without electricity, it’s hard to communicate that information to people who need it most, and with no snowplows to take care of roads, driving remains dangerous as melting snow refreezes into ice, hardened and packed down by each tire that crosses it.
This is very sad.
There will be plenty of time to assess what went wrong, and who did wrong, and the exact impact of specific problems. For now, the situation is this: Texas’s independent electric grid and energy industry was not, across the board, up to the task of a natural disaster of this severity. And Texans are paying the price.
