Blackout: An Intern Reflects on Texas Power Grid Failures | Article

At first, the snow that blanketed the streets of Austin, Texas, on Valentine’s Day, 2021, was joyous for my roommates and me. It was more snow than I had ever seen, and we watched as our neighbors grabbed trash can lids, laundry baskets, and kayaks to sled down the streets. We were soon joining them, bundled in layers of pajama pants and sweatshirts.

Shortly, dimmer realities started setting in. Our friends and families lost power, although we never did, being on the same power grid as a nearby hospital. Austin mutual aid groups braved the snowed-in streets to find and transport the many Austinites experiencing homelessness out of the snow and into shelter.

At the peak of the outages, 4.5 million Texans lost electricity, with nothing to heat their homes as temperatures plummeted to near- and sub-zero temperatures. What we assumed would be a night without heat eventually became three days without power for some.

“We’re the energy capital of the world, and we can’t keep the lights on,” said Ed Hirs, energy fellow at the University of Houston.

It wasn’t just electricity that was scarce. Nearly 12 million people experienced disruption to their water service, either because of burst pipes or boil notices due to low water pressure at water treatment plants. In Austin, grocery stores closed, limited their hours, and became inaccessible to those who could not drive on the ice or walk in the cold to reach them.

Over 100 people died as a result of the storm, due to extreme cold or carbon monoxide poisoning. Zip codes with higher percentages of lower-income residents and residents of color experienced worse outages across the state.

How the Power Plants Failed

The lower 48 states in the United States are connected by three main power grids: the Eastern Grid, the Western Grid, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which serves only within Texas borders and is not connected to the other grids. While other states experienced cold snaps and record energy load peaks during the week, they could pull from fuel mixes from other parts of the grid. Texas was left to its own devices.

Power generation and distribution failed for a variety of reasons. Electricity demand hit a record peak due to people needing to heat their homes in the cold weather. At the same time, power plants across all fuel types froze in the storm because of a lack of weatherization.

Other plants that were not frozen still experienced difficulty with distributing power. For some natural gas plants that relied on electricity to produce power, natural gas generation and distribution failed when electricity did, and vice versa.

Prices of electricity surged as well. For four days, wholesale prices of electricity were $9,000 per Megawatt-hour (MWh), a price cap set by ERCOT, as compared to a more typical price of $50/MWh. When some plants could not pay, they were forced to choose between an enormous bill or shutting off power to their customers.

In the midst of the failures, my household and those we know struggled to secure basic needs. We were consumed every day with checking city alerts, word from our loved ones, and the nearby gas station’s stock for our neighbors’ and our own meals.

Safety concerns competed in severity. We weighed the threat of contracting COVID-19 against the reality that our friend without water needed a shower and the chance to use the bathroom. We debated if we should drive on the snowed-in, accident-ridden roads to check on our families who stopped replying on their dead phones. Then, my roommates and I piled into a car to deliver measly peanut butter sandwiches and water to our elderly neighbors. When they answered the door, they were wrapped in all of their blankets to shield against their second day without any heat.

Preventing Outages

Since the outages, many have pointed to a similar winter storm in February of 2011 that caused rolling blackouts exactly a decade before. A report was released at the time in which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that regulates the transmission and sale of electricity, recommended measures to prepare the grid for similar situations in the future. Despite conversations at that time in the Texas legislature, nothing changed. Winterizing equipment, in order to prevent freezing in the future, is one part of a solution, but retrofitting plants for winterization can become expensive.

Grid resilience can also be boosted by a diverse mix of fuels, which already plays in Texas’ favor. 47.4 percent of ERCOT’s electricity generation comes from natural gas, 20 percent comes from coal, 20 percent from wind, 11 percent from nuclear, and the rest from solar and other sources. All fuel sources experienced failures in the storm, but natural gas equipment contributed the most to outages due to the lack of winterization.

Texas legislators are resisting interconnection with the larger grids in the United States. Hirs claims that grid interconnection may not have saved Texas power, as the deficit Texas faced was over 40 GW, and the most it could have drawn from the Western grid was 6 GW.

According to Hirs, part of the solution may be in the way Texas pays for and regulates prices of electricity.

“If a baseball team was paid on an electricity-only basis like the ERCOT market is, then only those 10 players taking the field today would get paid today. At the end of the summer, when you see the greatest peak demand, many generators just close down. Because they do not collect revenue, they are not paid to be winterized or to be ready to respond,” he explained.

In a capacity market, generators are paid for their capacity, or their ability to provide power in the future. Electricity is auctioned and bought from providers according to the expected electricity demand some years into the future.

Hirs called this “one element of a solution,” but mentions that capacity markets have their own problems, and critics of capacity markets worry that the consumer would have to front higher costs.

The Texas legislature has been debating how to prepare the grid for future similar events, and recently sent Senate Bill 3 to Gov. Greg Abbott for his approval. The bill doesn’t make any sweeping structural changes to the Texas grid system but would require critical power plants to upgrade their equipment for extreme weather.

For me, those moments in the dark felt like a premonition of our future. Unexpected weather events and natural disasters will only become more common as the impacts of climate change take effect. That week, everything that had mattered to me before, like work, and school, fell away as we struggled to secure food, water, and shelter for our neighbors and ourselves. I fear as though apocalyptic scenarios like the outages may become commonplace if we do not properly prepare for events like these.

Author: Rachel Snead