The extreme cold weather that often plagues the North-East has made its way to Texas, causing significant trouble for the state’s power grid.
Freezing weather reached Texans on Feb. 11 and has plagued the southern state since. The winter weather left millions of Texans without power as the cold weather caused the state’s worst blackouts in decades.
At the start of the cold front, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) announced that it expected to see record electricity usage to combat the cold.
“This statewide weather system is expected to bring Texas the coldest weather we’ve experienced in decades. With temperatures rapidly declining, we are already seeing high electric use and anticipating record-breaking demand in the ERCOT region,” said ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness on Feb. 11.
At the time, generators were asked to take precautionary steps to avoid the blackouts, including reviewing fuel supplies, implementing planned outages, and enacting winter weatherization procedures. However, the efforts yielded little success as the cold weather remained throughout the state.
The state’s electric grid’s failure triggered a public health emergency in the state, and temporary shelters were put in place for the two to three million Texans currently without power.
The power outages have also caused speculation and accusations to be made regarding who or what is responsible for the grid’s failure.
Many Democrats blame the Governor of Texas, Gregg Abbott, for failing to prepare the state for the storm adequately. Other groups blame the environmental movement and alternative energy, insisting that frozen wind turbines are to blame and demonstrate the limits of alternative energy sources.
According to an official from the ERCOT, 80% of the grid’s winter capacity, or 67 gigawatts, can be generated by natural gas, coal, and some nuclear power for the state of Texas. On Tuesday, an ERCOT rep said that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, were offline. Some sources estimate that the remaining 30 gigawatts were lost from thermal sources, including gas, coal, and nuclear energy.
On Wednesday, those numbers only got worse as 45 gigawatts total were offline, with 28 gigawatts coming from thermal sources and 18 gigawatts from renewable sources.
While blame can be passed back and forth between the two energy types, Governor Abbott has taken the position that ERCOT is to blame for the massive failure.
“This was a total failure by ERCOT. These are the experts. These are engineers in the power industry. These aren’t bureaucrats or whatever the case may be. These are specialists, and government has to rely upon on these specialists to be able to deliver in these types of situations,” said Governor Abbott.
Another contributing factor to Texas’s problem is the fact that the state is on its own power grid. There are three power grids in the United States: the eastern power grid, the western power grid, and Texas. This means that at least 90% of the state is controlled by and reliant upon ERCOT for its power because it cannot borrow energy from the other grids.
Outages are still ongoing in the state despite ERCOT’s efforts to restore power. The last update from ERCOT was that the group managed to restore approximately 3,500 MW of load, roughly 700,000 households, on Feb. 17.
