Texane is out of power thanks to a cold moment.
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A winter storm in Texas brought record low temperatures, snow and glowing eclipses through the state. Millions of Texans are still without power, and some people have questioned why a state that provides the most power in the US cannot turn on the light. Incorrect information about the eclipse also started spreading online, falsely placing the blame on wind and solar energy.
About 3 million people in Texas have had to deal with outages since Monday as generators and natural gas pipes froze, paralyzing the state’s production capacity. As a result, the Texas Electric Reliability Board (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, controls rolling blackouts to avoid a network outage.
Here’s what you need to know about the power outages in Texas.
What happened?
This past weekend, a winter storm came to Texas and brought icy cold into the state. When temperatures began to drop in the teens on Monday morning, generators across the state began to freeze and go offline, leading to a significant decline in energy production. At the same time, the demand for power increased as people turned on the thermostat.
Nearly 50% of the power generated by Texas comes from natural gas, with the other half under coal, wind, nuclear and solar power. However, due to the cold, gas can not even get through the pipes from the ground. ERCOT says that 46,000 megawatts were offline from Wednesday. One megawatt is enough to power about 200 homes a year. As of Wednesday, there are 70 to 80 power stations on the road, out of 680 across the country. Thermal energy – natural gas, coal and nuclear power – accounted for 28,000 megawatts while the other accounted for 16,000 wind and solar power.
“The production capacity of gas generators, especially with full production, is affected by the freezing point on the natural gas supply,” Bill Magness, ERCOT president and CEO, said during a live stream on Wednesday. “So this is the most important solution to get the resources back to get people back their power.”
The significant drop in power generated led to eclipses by the state as ERCOT tried to keep a balance between supply and demand to prevent a “catastrophic” eclipse. This made the interruption last much longer than ERCOT expected.
Texas has its own independent power grid and is not connected to the eastern interconnection and the western interconnection networks that cover the rest of the country. The state cannot divert the power to retain its offer.
Some people blame wind and solar power. What’s the story?
Confusion over the cause of the blackouts began to spread on social media on Tuesday, especially from government officials.
“The reason for ‘blackouts’ is complicated, but in summary: Texas has taken too many lessons from Cali, too much subsidized renewable energy, and emitted the base tax energy like natural gas,” says Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas, tweeted Tuesday.
A similar sentiment comes from fellow GOP Texas Ronny Jackson, who said on Facebook on Tuesday, “We need to immediately put our trust in renewable energy.”
But on Tuesday, the Texas government, Greg Abbott, also a Republican, pointed out that natural gas must be frozen as part of the problem.
“The reason there is no power available to your viewers is because the generators froze and their equipment was unable to generate power. On top of that, the natural gas flowing in those generators was also frozen.” Abbott told Houston’s ABC-13.
On Tuesday night, however, Abbott went on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News and gave a different account of what happened.
“Our wind and solar power shut down, and that’s a combined 10% of our power grid, and that put Texas in a situation where the country did not have power,” he told Hannity. “As a result, it appears that fossil fuels are needed for the state of Texas.”
However, according to ERCOT officials, the majority of the power lost comes from thermal energy, which consists mainly of natural gas, and not from wind or solar energy.
“From 9 a.m.,” ERCOT said in a press release Wednesday, “about 46,000 MW of generation of the system was enforced during this extreme winter event. Of that, 28,000 MW is thermal and 18,000 MW is wind and solar.”
When will power go on again?
ERCOT does not have a specific time when it will operate at full power, but is working to restore power. However, there is more to it than just turning on.
“The challenge now was that we were repairing the service, and if the network became unstable again due to the problems with the weather and the imbalance in supply and demand, we unfortunately had to withdraw it,” Magness said on Wednesday. .
As more electricity returns to homes, continuous power outages may continue for days until the expected warmer weather arrives this weekend.