The powerful winter storm that swept across the continental United States this week erupted in Texas with Arctic temperatures causing widespread inflammation, plunging millions into darkness as snow and record cold paralyzed the country’s second largest state.
Republican lawmakers and right-wing experts opposed to the Biden government’s clean energy policy jumped at the chance to blame the Lone Star State’s burgeoning use of wind power.
But while production of all sources of electricity in Texas plunged, frozen instruments at coal, nuclear and natural gas power plants, along with a limited supply of natural gas, were the main cause of the persistent eclipses, Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Texas Electricity Trust Board told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. (ERCOT is the main network operator of the state.)
Energy analysts and electricity experts said the failure to plan for extreme weather scenarios caused the nature of the disaster to become more common as climate chaos increased pressure on human systems.
Ironically, wind energy was one bright spot for network operators, as the resource, which tends to be in the winter months, actually exceeded the daily production estimate this past weekend.
ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Transmission towers and power lines lead to a substation following a snowstorm on February 16, 2021 in Fort Worth, Texas.
“There’s so much misinformation and ridiculous political twist out there that’s focused on icy wind turbines, that’s the bulk of the offer that ERCOT has most realistically planned,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston. . “For the coldest day in winter, they only expected to get a small portion of the pie from wind and solar power.”
In contrast, the network operator planned to extract about 90% of the electricity load from what he calls ‘fixed and reliable resources’, such as coal, natural gas and nuclear reactors, he said.
“It was a failure that our ‘fixed and reliable resources’ were not firm or reliable when we needed them most,” Cohan said.
Of about 70,000 megawatts of gas, coal and nuclear power plants, as many as 30,000 megawatts have been offline since Sunday night, said Jesse Jenkins, an electricity expert at Princeton University.
“The key story remains the failure of thermal power plants – natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants – which ERCOT reckons will be there when needed,” Jenkins said in a statement. series of tweets Tuesday night. “They failed.”
LM Otero / AP Customers use the light from a cell phone to look at the meat department of a grocery store in Dallas on Feb. 16. Although the store lost power, it was open for cash sales.
To further complicate matters, homes in Texas are designed to keep the temperature outside the air about 30 degrees cooler during the summer, not to keep the heat out during icy winters, says Joshua Rhodes, a research fellow the University of Texas at Austin’s Webber. Energy group. Now that heat loss is contributing to the rising demand in the network.
“Everything in Texas is focused on the biggest demand in the summer as we all try to air our homes and keep it 75 when it’s 105 outside,” Rhodes said. ‘We designed our homes for this 30 degree difference. But now our homes are trying to maintain a 60 degree difference, and it is not designed to do that. It’s a losing battle. ”
Under normal circumstances, the network operators and utilities in Texas are planning for the highest demand during the summer heat. During the winter, many plants sit offline and the stock is shipped elsewhere until power-supplying air conditioners and refrigerator systems increase the demand for electricity around August. The power outages now show that ‘demand forecasts were wrong, and they were far too low,’ said electricity analyst Nick Steckler.
“It was a big miss,” said Steckler, who heads the U.S. power unit at energy research firm BloombergNEF, which is a separate company from the financial news thread. “I can not stress how much the available capacity underscores the total expected demand.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Tuesday called for an investigation into ERCOT’s preparations and declared the case in this legislative session a necessary matter to ensure Texans never again experience power outages on the scale they have not seen in the last few days. ”
“The Texas Electric Reliability Board has been anything but reliable for the past 48 hours,” Abbott said in his statement. ‘Too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes, because our state is facing icy temperatures and severe winter weather. This is unacceptable. ”
It was not just the network operator and power plants. Jenkins said a gas pipeline and electricity in Texas are very sensitive to cold weather conditions. his Twitter thread.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Pike Electric service trucks line up after the snowstorm on Feb. 16 in Fort Worth, Texas.
In that sense, the blackouts reflect another recent climate disaster facing Texans. After years of concrete spreading that spread far and wide, Houston’s lack of climate planning left it vulnerable to catastrophic floods when Hurricane Harvey landed in 2017. Andrew Dessler, a climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, said at the time. HuffPost that the storm ‘offers a foretaste of the future’.
It is impossible to know yet whether this particular cold moment is related to climate change, and there is a lively debate about the extent to which warming of the North Pole weakens the forces in the stratosphere that usually cause icy temperatures to the northern latitude of the earth. restrict. In 2018, the scientist from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Marlene Kretschmer, found that periods of a weakened ‘polar vortex’ force have increased over the past four decades and that this corresponds to about 60% of the cold extremes in the mid-latitude. -part of Eurasia during The period. But researchers argued in peer-reviewed journal Nature last year that there was not enough data to make definitive claims about the link.
Much less strict ethics and adherence to facts lead the political opportunists who contribute to the discussion of what is happening in Texas.
Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.) shared a 2014 image of a helicopter cutting off a wind turbine in Sweden, calling it “a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources such as natural gas and coal.”
The opposite ends of right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s media empire have managed to project a unified message that also blames icy turbines.
On the more coveted newspaper side, the editors of The Wall Street Journal – an institution whose willingness to bend facts for ideological purposes has angered reporters in its newsroom – expressed what it calls “the paradox of the left” climate agenda: The less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them, ‘in an opinion piece entitled’ A Deep Green Freeze ‘.
On the populist television side, Fox News star Tucker Carlson drew on wind turbines in his monologue on Monday night: ‘It all worked out well until the day it got cold outside. The windmills have failed like the silly fashion accessories they have, and people in Texas are dead. It’s not about defeating the state of Texas – it’s actually a wonderful state – but about giving you an idea of what’s going to happen to you. ‘
Carlson delivered in his usual way and provided the kind of confusing political misinformation on which the public can now depend on the following disasters.
“It seems like there are always narratives that are very far from reality,” Cohan said. “Gaslight is a good word for it.”
Sara Boboltz reported.
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