Last week, Texas was hit by a freak winter storm, one that left millions without electricity. Although much of the power grid has been repaired, there are still ongoing problems with the Texas infrastructure, from plumbing problems to people struggling to find necessities like food and water. Yet the most immediate crisis was that Texas, a state unaccustomed to winter weather, left millions of people without heat in icy temperatures. The public utilities in Texas were at one point less than five minutes away from an eclipse that could last weeks or months. Experts believe it will take months to fully calculate the death toll, although so far nearly 80 deaths related to the storm have been confirmed.
Republicans like the Texas government, Greg Abbott, have not surprisingly argued that the massive power outage somehow discredits left-wing policies. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States,” Abbott told Fox News on Tuesday, adding later that the problem was “[o]your wind and our solar power ‘and claims that it’ only shows that fossil fuels are needed. ‘
But experts agree that the reality of what went wrong and what can be done to prevent this kind of crisis is much more complicated. And it starts with understanding how our electricity network works.
The American electrical network, which The Wall Street Journal described in 2016 as ‘one of the engineering wonders of modern history’, can be traced back to the modern concept of power grids. According to Alexis Kwasinksi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, Swanson School of Engineering, it originated in the late 1800s. The aim was to provide as many people as possible with electricity at the lowest cost.
“The solution to such a design problem has led to the power grid concept in which some large power plants supply electricity to many more but much smaller loads that are sometimes located a hundred kilometers from the power plants,” Kwasinski told Salon in an email. . “One of the solutions to maintain system stability was to connect power stations and loads so that they work on a composite level.” As a result of this interconnected approach, the United States developed long transmission lines across the various states so that power could be transmitted over long distances with low losses.
One problem with this approach, Kwasinski explained, is that all the different charges have the same quality power because everything is interconnected. As a result, it is expensive to change power networks so that power can be allocated according to the needs of individual locations in ways that can prevent power outages or prioritize regions with more urgent needs.
Kwasinski says resilience was not a goal in designing power networks – at least not until now. ‘It is only recently that society [has] began to demand higher resilience from the power grid, ‘he said.
The problem originally was that power grids were designed to meet the needs of the early 1900s. Even more modern power systems are planned decades in advance, meaning the existing power grid in Texas is the result of planning processes made decades ago, Kwasinski says.
“At that time (let’s say in 2011) no planner knew that the state’s power grid would be subject to such cold conditions in February 2021, even if there was an interruption during the winter of 2011 due to insufficient power generation,” he said. he added. Texan engineers, understandably, thought they should design with heat waves in mind, not the kind of winter storms you would encounter more in the northeast.
Dr. Masoud Barati, who is also an assistant professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Pittsburgh, told Salon exactly how things went wrong in Texas. He explained this in the context of the HVDC line, or high-voltage direct current, and what the primary operation of the existing HVDC was in the Texas Electric Reliability Board (ERCOT). He explained that in the eclipse of Texas, there were five HVDC interconnections that ultimately amounted to 1.1 GW of ‘binding line capacity as interconnection with other neighboring states and states’. This appears to be insufficient for two reasons: First, ‘the winter peak load recorded by ERCOT was 69 150 MW and a loss of 34 GW of resources for heat and renewable energy’, which means that ‘the 1.1 GW HVDC did not can not support significant production loss and load. ‘
In addition, because Texas’ neighbors were hit by the same storm and nearly utilized their ability to generate energy, or found that the amount of electricity generated was less than the amount demanded because most homes in Texas used the electricity for heating.
Ironically, while Governor Abbott tries to argue that the winter storm and eclipse somehow brought a Green New Deal into disrepute, it actually illustrated why we need it.
“From a Green New Deal perspective, we want public utilities that prioritize public safety and resilience and disaster preparedness over the optimal price in a perfect market equilibrium situation and really nice weather, so I think that’s an important distinction,” said Daniel Aldana. said. Cohen, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of ‘A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green Deal,’ told Salon. After noting that the power grid in Texas was deregulated and therefore undemocratic – ‘you do not have a clear line of responsibility like you should have with a public system’, Cohen argued that the solution to energy inefficiency issues, Cohen argued. as presented in his book is a national power grid.
“You would have a single national network, which is very strongly interconnected,” Cohen explained. “This means a network that is dominated by renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. Based on the full national interconnection, if there is less energy or no energy in one region of the country, you can shoot energy from there from other regions. “
In the event of the winter storm in Texas, for example, a national energy network would have allowed public authorities to divert energy stored elsewhere in the national system so that it could be diverted where it was most needed. In terms of disaster resistance, such as extreme weather conditions, a national power grid would “essentially mean that there exists as a national solidarity of energy covering the whole country, instead of having a large region to take care of itself.”
Cohen also warned that if a Green New Deal is not implemented, we could find a kind of eco-apartheid situation where largely white, largely affluent people could basically store solar panels and batteries and resilience at the expense of a fully egalitarian system where literally every home and community safety and reliability is guaranteed. ‘
Barati offered Salon another set of proposals.
“If only Texas had stronger ties with the rest of the US with HVDC and HVAC [High Voltage Alternating Current] would have been good, “Barati wrote. He also pointed out that” if only appropriate reliability planning had been carried out, taking into account the coordinated transmission line expansion and production planning, subject to rare and common events, Texas would have had appropriate generation reserves. ‘In addition, he noted that’ Texas has a single energy market, which means it is vulnerable to rare events. If Texas only had a properly functioning capacity market for both production and transmission sides, they would have had enough extra transmission and generation capacity to cope with the shortages. ‘
Whichever solution you choose, one thing is likely: Due to climate change, we should expect to see more extreme weather in areas not accustomed to it, from the wildfires on the West Coast to the winter storm in Texas.
“The way is through the changes in the environment that have taken place as a result of climate change,” said dr. Kevin Trenberth, a leading scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote to Salon when asked about the possible role of winter climate change in Texas. storm. “These generally include warmer conditions, including much warmer oceans, higher sea surface temperatures, reduced sea ice and glaciers, and higher water vapor in the atmosphere.” Trenberth noted that the extra available energy accelerated the water cycle, leading to more evaporation and heavier rainfall.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story incorrectly identified the HVAC acronym to stand for heating, ventilation and air conditioning. The story has been updated.