One Year Later:
The Texas Freeze
Revealed a Fragile Energy System and Inspired Lasting Misinformation -
Inside Climate News
A sign warns of icy conditions on
Interstate Highway 35 on February 18, 2021 in Killeen, Texas. Credit:
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
By Dan Gearino
Texas is recovering from this week’s
winter storm, nearly a year after a much more severe set of storms led
to a devastating failure of the electricity system and about 250
deaths. The February 2021 storms showed the fragility of the grid at a
time when climate change is contributing to an increase in extreme
weather.
But the most enduring legacy of the 2021
blackouts may be the spread of a falsehood: the idea that the crisis
was mainly due to the failure of renewable energy.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia,
invoked this idea in December, when
he announced he was voting against President Joe Biden’s climate
and social spending bill, saying that a rapid transition to clean
energy “will have catastrophic consequences for the American people
like we have seen in both Texas and California in the last two years.”
Fossil-fuel industry groups and elected
officials across the country have made similar claims, part of a trail
of distorted facts that has helped to obscure the true story of the
Texas power crisis. That story, as told in a succession of reports by
outside experts, is that the most consequential failures were in the
natural gas industry and at gas-fired power plants.
Yet many Texas officials have responded
as if they believed the warped version of events, choosing not to
engage with what really happened.
“The idea that wind and solar were the
problem, when our grid is dominated by fossil fuels, doesn’t add up in
any way,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the
University of Texas at Austin.
In the aftermath of the 2021 storms, Gov.
Greg Abbott, a Republican, oversaw a complete change in the leadership
of the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the grid operator, the
Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. But he and other
state officials did much less to require changes to the gas industry,
which is regulated by the Railroad Commission of Texas.
Meanwhile, various reports have confirmed
the central role of the gas industry in the power outages. These
include
a joint investigation from the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; a
detailed
timeline of events by the Energy Institute at the University of
Texas at Austin; and
a paper in the journal Energy Research & Social Science,
the authors of which include energy researchers from Texas and across
the country, including Webber.
The reports showed that every major
energy source, including wind, had problems that contributed to a
shortage of electricity, but that the grid’s heavy reliance on gas
meant that the breakdowns in the gas delivery system were a leading
factor. Much of the gas system was not winterized, so many parts of it
couldn’t function in extreme cold.
“I’m concerned that our regulators over
the natural gas industry don’t appear to even be interested or curious
about the capabilities of the system they have oversight of,” said
Beth Garza, a Texas-based senior fellow with the R Street Institute, a
think tank that promotes open markets. Until 2019, she was head of the
office that serves as the independent watchdog for ERCOT.
“I don’t know what’s in the railroad
commissioners’ heads,” she said. “But publicly their comments seem to
be, ‘Natural gas wasn’t the problem, we were the solution.’”
Among those comments was a March 19
opinion column in The Wall Street Journal with the
headline, “Texas’ Blackouts Blew in the Wind,” by Wayne Christian, a
member of the commission.
“Regardless of your thoughts on climate
change, last month’s storm made painfully clear that climate
catastrophists have an oversize influence on public policy,” he wrote.
“An obsessive focus on reaching the unattainable goal of zero carbon
emissions led to decades of poor decisions that prioritized and
subsidized unreliable energy sources (wind and solar) at the expense
of reliable ones (natural gas, coal and nuclear).”
This commentary, and many others like it,
helped to underscore that Texas officials did not seem interested in a
serious investigation of what went wrong.
The shortcomings of Texas’ response to
the 2021 crisis led some analysts to worry that the state was not
prepared for another storm of similar magnitude. Luckily, Texas hasn’t
yet faced that kind of test, even with the storm that hit this week,
which turned out to be shorter and less cold than what happened last
year.
Freeze Cut Supply and Spiked Demand
Winter storms hit Texas in February 2021,
bringing snow, ice and sub-zero temperatures.
The extreme cold led to a spike in demand
for natural gas and electricity for home heating. The high demand for
gas was happening at the same time as a drop in the supply of gas.
Many of the companies that extract and deliver the fuel were going
offline because of frozen equipment or because they were shutting down
equipment to avoid weather-related damage.
The sudden decrease in the availability
of gas meant that some gas-fired power plants, Texas’ leading source
of electricity, could no longer get fuel and had to shut down. Other
gas-fired plants shut down because of the effects of freezing on
valves, air systems and other equipment.
ERCOT was faced with record-high demand
for electricity and a plummeting supply. In response, the grid
operator initiated blackouts, starting on Feb. 15, over much of the
state, leaving some residents in the dark for days.
The sudden loss of natural gas supplies
led to a nationwide spike in gas prices. Gas producers that were still
online made billions of dollars in just a few days, while utilities
and other gas buyers across the country were bound by contracts that
forced them to purchase it at prices that would take years, or even
decades, to pay off.
ERCOT records showed that all electricity
sources were impaired in some way, except for the state’s small share
of hydroelectric power.
But the majority of the power losses were
from gas plants, including 25 gigawatts of capacity that went offline.
Coal and nuclear outages cut another 4.5 gigawatts and 1.3 gigawatts
respectively, according to the University of Texas at Austin report.
Considering that peak demand was about 70 gigawatts, losing about 30
gigawatts from gas, coal and nuclear was a disaster.
Wind energy also performed poorly,
starting with ice accumulation that led to some wind farms needing to
shut down early in the crisis. Wind power outages peaked at about 9
gigawatts, a number that takes into account wind levels on those days,
according to the UT Austin report.
Solar power is rapidly growing in Texas,
but it remains a tiny share of the state’s electricity supply and had
little effect, positive or negative, during the crisis.
“It’s not like wind is blameless, but
(the power crisis) wasn’t caused by wind failure,” said Webber. To say
otherwise is “at best misleading, at worst an outright lie.”
About 4.5 million Texans lost power, many
of them living in homes that were not built to withstand frigid
temperatures.
At least 246 people died of causes related to the storm and power
outages, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
The deaths included a mother and her
seven-year-old daughter who died of carbon monoxide poisoning and a
60-year old man with disabilities who died of hypothermia, according
to reporting by
the Houston Chronicle,
KTRK television in Houston and other local media outlets.
The Texas power crisis turned out to be
the largest example in U.S. history of grid operators forcing
blackouts because the electricity supply was not enough to meet
demand, according to
the FERC/NERC report.
Hot Air Blames Wind, but Cold Facts
Implicate Gas
During the crisis, when many Texans were
still without power, Abbott said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show that
failures in wind and solar “thrust Texas into a situation where it was
lacking power [on] a statewide basis.”
This framing was
widely repeated across Fox News’ schedule. On the Fox & Friends
morning show, images from the state were shown above a chyron saying,
“Frozen wind turbines cause blackouts in Texas.”
Fossil-fuel industry groups and
sympathetic think tanks also trumpeted this message.
“This week, as the state and nation are
blanketed in ice, we can expect most of our wind turbines to be still
and solar panels to produce little to no electricity,”
said Katie Tahuahua, communications manager for the Life:Powered
campaign, a pro-fossil fuel public relations project from the Texas
Public Policy Foundation. “Fortunately, our abundant natural gas and
clean coal power plants can be ramped up to meet our power needs at
any time.”
William Pendley, who had been the top
official in the federal Bureau of Land Management in the Trump
Administration, tweeted a link to a post from the Texas Public Policy
Foundation and added
this comment: “Read the whole thing but; short answer: Texas—home
to vast oil and gas supplies—drank the renewable energy Koolaid. Sad.”
But there also was substantial news
coverage about the actual causes of the crisis, with outlets like
The Texas Tribune and many others reporting what really happened.
Doug Lewin, a Texas-based clean energy
advocate and consultant, said any discussion of the attempts to
distort the facts should also include that many media outlets
succeeded in holding leaders accountable.
“There are definitely a lot of people
that believe the misinformation, but I think most people understand
what happened,” he said.
Post-Blackout Legislation Only
Tackles Part of the Problem
In the months that followed, Texas
political leaders vowed to take action to fix the systems that had
failed.
But the steps they took were in line with
the view that the problem was in electricity regulation and
management, not in the gas industry’s inability to deliver its product
during extreme weather.
To be sure, there were many issues with
the state’s electricity regulation and management, but this was just
part of the problem.
On June 8, Abbott signed several bills
inspired by the crisis. Among them,
Senate Bill 3 aims to make the electricity system more reliable by
requiring power plants to winterize, among other steps. Some gas wells
and other gas infrastructure would be designated as critical
infrastructure, which would mean that they would have priority to
receive electricity during times of forced outages so that they could
continue to deliver fuel.
The bill also said that natural gas
production and delivery facilities would need to winterize if they
were part of the supply chain of gas for power plants.
A new state panel is determining which gas sites should be
included and will issue a report by September 2022. After that, the
railroad commission would set the rules for winterization.
“We promised not to leave session until
we fixed these problems, and I am proud to say that we kept that
promise,”
Abbott said. “These laws will improve the reliability of the
electric grid and help ensure these problems never happen again.”
Abbott’s office did not reply to a
request for comment.
Lewin said the legislation fell far short
of what was needed, by not doing enough to require prompt action by
gas companies, and by not addressing the larger problem that millions
of people live in homes with inefficient heating systems and
inadequate insulation.
“Overall, the system is very vulnerable,”
he said.
Public Disapproval of Response,
Officials Silent on Climate
After the state legislature did little to
address reliability issues in the gas system, there was backlash from
the public and some legislators.
A poll released in November by the University of Texas and The
Texas Tribune showed that 60 percent of respondents disapproved of the
way state leaders and the legislature handled concerns about
reliability of the electricity grid, and only 18 percent approved. It
was the lowest level of approval for any of the 13 issues covered in
the poll.
One flashpoint was that the legislation
didn’t change an existing rule that said gas producers could apply to
opt out of having to follow winterization rules by paying a $150 fee.
“Your rulemaking proposal sucks, and we
need a different direction,” said Texas Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston,
in a
September hearing with leaders of the railroad commission.
That comment was indicative of broader
public criticism of the legislature and the railroad commission for
providing little assurance that the gas system would be ready for the
next winter crisis.
In response, the railroad commission made
changes to the opt-out rule before approving it, saying that the
largest gas producers were no longer eligible to apply for an opt-out.
“Despite what you may read in the news,
no one is getting a bailout, and no one is getting a loophole,” said
the commission’s Wayne Christian in November, as it
adopted rules to comply with the new law.
Christian did not respond to a request
for comment.
Texas leaders’ statements about the
causes of the crisis were also notable for the almost complete lack of
discussion about climate change and its role in the rising frequency
of severe storms.
But university researchers and former
officials have been more open to discussing these subjects.
A group of former members of the Public
Utility Commission of Texas wrote
a report in June with 20 recommendations for improving the state’s
power system, including that “ERCOT should design and explore multiple
climate change and extreme weather forecasts.” Among the co-authors
was Pat Wood, who was the commission’s chairman in the 1990s and later
FERC chairman in the George W. Bush administration.
“Texas is the world’s ninth-largest
economy,” said Wood and his co-authors. “We owe it to our families and
fellow citizens to learn from this event, plan for the future, and do
the right thing for the good of Texas.”
The Energy Research & Social Science
paper also discusses the role of climate change, saying that Texas
leaders have the opportunity to learn from what happened last winter
to build a cleaner and more reliable grid.
“Getting this balance of cleanliness,
affordability, and reliability right is not simply a technocratic
question as it has major implications for health, equity, and human
well-being,” the paper said. “As such, the big freeze of 2021 provides
a cautionary tale that others can learn from.”
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