The catastrophe this week in Texas left more than 4 million people in the dark and cold, and even more so without clean water, when a rare explosion of Arctic air dropped the temperature, freezing both natural gas plants and wind turbines. .
Texas “planned more for heat waves than for ice storms,” said Dan Reicher, who worked in the Clinton administration’s energy department on renewable energy and is now at Stanford University. And the guideline now is to figure out how to prevent a recurrence – a difficult situation given the independence of Texas’ network and the sharp opposition from Republicans there to liaising with other states and overseeing federal regulators. its power system.
So far, the Biden government has shown little that its agenda is driven by Texas, which is already leading the country in wind power. But Congress is watching the hearings to look at this week’s power outages, which are likely to put the spotlight on the state’s network.
‘How much and how far does the Biden government want to dig into this from the broader federal perspective? And it has yet to be seen, ”said Reicher.
Although scientists have not definitively linked climate change to the polar vortex that caused the temperature to drop this week, evidence has begun to show that years of rising temperatures in the North Pole may play a role in changing the trajectory of the jet stream that the ice fed. meanders in the southern states.
“The way I think about it is that you open the door to the freezer,” says Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University.
And although Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said the link to climate change has not yet been resolved, it’s undeniable that more “tail risk” events are being fueled that were once considered rare. And both Texas and California, which had a devastating heatwave last year and recorded a wildfire, raise important questions about how to protect critical infrastructure in a warmer world.
“It’s kind of the insurance question,” Dessler said. “How much do you pay for the insurance and take the chance that you will never use it, as opposed to not having insurance and then being wiped out?”
California has been experiencing the effects of climate change on its network for years – wildfires that threaten transmission have grown in size and duration, heat waves have increased in intensity and duration, and droughts in the Northwest are limiting important hydropower supplies. In response to increasing liabilities due to wildfire damage, which forced the Pacific Pacific Gas & Electric Company into bankruptcy in 2019, state utilities increasingly shut down transmission lines during windstorms to reduce the likelihood of burning flames.
In an effort to reduce carbon emissions and create more power in the state, California has set aggressive renewable targets, which increased the amount of solar power in the past decade to 27 gigawatts in 2019, more than one-third of the country’s solar power according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. And to balance his network, it helped build an 11-market power market that enables him to export excess solar power during the day and collect electricity from other sources after sunset.
But the unplanned outages of August – the first state since the 2000-2001 energy crisis – highlighted other weaknesses in California’s network. An analysis by the state of the failures that shut down the power for 490,000 customers one night two hours and 320,000 customers for another time less time, placed the blame on the historic heat wave across the West, which demand rises and the amount of power California could limit imports from other states. But it also pointed to the state’s high percentage of renewable energy, which sees its electricity production drop sharply as the sun sets, which requires other power plants to push up quickly – and which they were unable to do that week.
Like California, Texas was at an important moment in a power shortage: within an hour of early Monday morning, 30 gigawatts of generation – a quarter of the entire state’s capacity – fell off the grid just as a freeze hit the demand for levels is usually seen only in summer. This led to a few days of blackouts affecting 4.4 million Texas customers.
Texas’ problems may stem in part from the rules for an open market that are different from markets in other regions across the country, many of which require a ‘capacity market’ where power producers commit to keeping their plants available for years to come. When the cold descended over the state, bringing natural gas and freezing wind turbines under control, several power plants that could help fill the gap were off line for maintenance.
Nor did the state heed the warnings from a report on a similar freeze in 2011, which called for isolating generators to protect against the cold – an expensive solution, but which could mitigate the outages.
Experts believe that increasing connections across the country that may allow long distances to move could help prevent future blackouts.
Michael Wara, director of climate and energy programs at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said Texas and California could benefit from greater coordination with their neighbors – and Biden could help.
“There is a shared dilemma between our situations, and it relates to the weather conditions associated with climate change,” he said. “In both situations, the real world has surpassed the planned extreme case by a large margin.”
Texas resisted the strategy, and by refusing to cross state lines, the state kept federal regulators away from its power grid. This is left on its own when resources cannot meet demand – as has been the case several times in recent years when heat has pushed the system to its extreme.
“There are currently a lot of finger-pointing by politicians in Texas, but there are a lot of painful lessons for them in terms of the way their market is managed,” said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. . . “One of the weaknesses in Texas is that they are not very well connected to any other part of the state.”
While the immediate focus is there to restore power in the state, some have begun to look ahead to how the network can prepare for the future.
“The one common element from the California situation and what seems to be the case in Texas is again,” Richard Glick, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told reporters on Thursday. “All the experts tell us that this kind of wild, unforeseen weather is going to happen much more frequently than has happened in the past. It is our and others’ responsibility to ensure that the grid is more resilient to the extreme weather conditions.”
Glick questions whether Texas should continue with its own approach, noting that nearby states with access to generation across transmission lines have managed to recover more quickly from the freeze, including much of the Middle East and even El Paso, and Lubbock, Texas, working outside of Texas’ primary network. The Midwest power grid is run by network operators connected to the rest of the country, and suffered from eclipses on Monday and Tuesday, but were largely restored on Wednesday.
Power grid experts have been calling for decades for a massive expansion of transmission lines to ensure that power supply problems suffered by California and Texas can be alleviated by the supply of electricity from other parts of the country, or even from Canada and Mexico. This is an approach that the administration of Biden is likely to try to follow, but they will need to devise a way to manage the billions or trillions of expenditures needed and find out how the bureaucratic problems that have delayed the process for decades , can be removed. .
“The problem is not that transmission providers are looking for handouts,” said Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, an association for transmission builders. “If the broadcast [needs are] identified and placed in a transmission plan, we will build it. Two real areas that create barriers to building more transmission infrastructure: one allows and sits, and the other is cost allocation. Who pays for it. ‘
Green groups generally agree that more transmission is needed – linking rural areas with lots of sun and wind with population centers will be the key to carbon dioxide networking – but they do not think more wires will end the process. be not. Instead, they point to new technologies, such as the development of ‘micro-grids’ that are less dependent on remote power sources and the roll-out of batteries that can store power for when needed.
“First of all, we need to realize that we are unlikely to be able to prevent every interruption of this kind that we are likely to see in the next 30 years,” said Mark Dyson, head of electric power with clean energy. think tank Rocky Mount Institute. “It’s over time to recognize a fundamental vulnerability of the power system and take advantage of where we are now with digital technologies, more widespread technology, storage and flexibility and deal with the cause and not play a mole with this large-scale systems. “
Republicans are unlikely to accept an infrastructure bill with green energy incentives, like the one Biden is planning. But some conservatives argue that the bill could greatly help make the energy network more resilient to weather conditions.
“It looks like an infrastructure bill is likely to move and it will include energy supplies,” said former Republican FERC commissioner Bernard McNamee, now a partner at McGuire Woods’ law firm.
“I do not think it will be a simple solution. It is going to be a lot of hard work, a lot of thinking by smart people to come up with practical solutions,” he added.