Surviving the Snowpocalypse in Texas

It was 72˚ today. A week ago the high was the inversion of that: 27˚. Texas is fickle that way.

Last week’s freak winter storm (it was named Uri, by the way) was something like a 150-year event. In other words, the last time we faced extended freezing temperatures down into the teens, most Texans were used to getting by without electricity. So there wasn’t a “last time” to learn from, to know how to prepare for this one.

Mr. Spherical Model took this photo early Monday, Feb. 15, early morning. We got a 

bit more snow, and it stayed in patches until Saturday. When he posted this, he said: 

Question: What's unusual about this picture?

Answer: * My house is in Houston.

    * It's 14˚F.

    *RealFeel is -10˚F (It's what my phone says, but doesn't feel like it to me).

    * I have power. At least for now. Over 375,000 in Houston area do not have power.

    * I do not have water. No water pressure at all. And it's not caused by frozen pipes 

       in my house. It's a regional problem.

    * By Sunday we'll have a high in the 70's.

One thing I've noticed about life in the Gulf Coast: there will be natural disasters. Usually they're hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. In some areas, wildfires. This weeklong deep freeze was a new scenario to living Texans. But, as with the others, Texans are reminded who to rely on. We need to rely on God. And we need to rely on one another for help through the acute situation.

If government, or a utility company, is who you rely on—your god—you’re going to be let down.

I’m hesitant to criticize the frontline workers, who have to work to repair and restore power during the worst weather conditions—while the rest of us are hunkering down in our homes, where at least we have blankets and food. They are the heroes.

But the people in distant offices, making decisions that affect our lives—they’re fair game for criticism, and for getting our crowd-sourced suggestions on how to learn from this one so we’re better prepared for the next 150-year event—which, who knows, might show up next year.

Image from Chad Prather on Facebook

I’m not likely to ever be an expert on energy, enough to know what happened. But I’ve compiled some resources below. I’ll do a brief timeline summary. Then I’m going to share son Political Sphere’s assessment of what happened. I haven’t had him write a guest post in a long time. It’s a short one, so I’ll embed it in the middle, and then add a few comments.

 

Basic Timeline

·       There was an executive order on about day one of this presidency. It required adherence to “green energy” standards, which were not going to be useful during a polar vortex in Texas.

·       A week ahead of the polar vortex, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas—it manages the electric grid covering most of Texas) requested permission to temporarily exceed emission standards in order to provide power to Texans during freezing weather.

·       The federal government refused; they suggested Texas buy energy from out of state, rather than exceed standards (although nearby states would also be suffering from freezing weather—even Mexico faced this problem). ERCOT wrote a letter dated February 14 to explain that they had exhausted all other avenues, and that the temporary permission to exceed emission standards was necessary; the Feds responded that day, 8:00 PM, that it would be OK, as long as they did as much as possible not to exceed, and it was temporary. 

·       This was the day of the arrival of the storm. Cold temperatures arrived before the additional capacity was brought online. It would have taken less energy, and been less stressful on the system overall, if the permission had been granted so additional capacity could be brought online during warmer temperatures.

·       ERCOT workers saw that need was rising quickly, and supply was falling short. Fearing catastrophic failures (fires that would destroy capacitors, as I understand it), they turned off some capacity—shedding they call it—and started rolling blackouts.

·       People began losing power on Sunday afternoon, February 14—Happy Valentine’s Day!

·       Rolling blackouts didn’t go as planned, at least in my area (Houston). They couldn’t easily switch, once an area was switched off. So areas that lost power Sunday stayed blacked out until Wednesday or even Thursday. My area was without power for only 31 hours between Monday night and Wednesday afternoon; we are a mile from a fire station, which may have helped.

·       Power was prioritized for hospitals and fire stations. It was not prioritized for gas suppliers to energy plants, which meant loss of fuel sources, making the situation worse.

·       Wind and solar, often unreliable, were unable to provide their expected allotment of power. Wind turbines froze. They were not hardened for the weather, because it was not considered cost-effective to do so in an area that hadn’t seen such low temperatures in a century.

·       Nuclear power (there is one plant in the Houston region and two others in the state) is typically reliable; however, a sensor froze, and the system interpreted that as a problem requiring shutdown. Once resolved, this source was brought back online.

·       Residents were requested to lower the heat to 68 or below (66 or below later on) to lower power needs. But once power was lost to homes, indoor temperatures dropped dramatically. We kept our home no lower than 59˚, using a gas fireplace. Other homes—particularly those that lost power on Sunday (we didn’t lose ours until late Monday night)—went as low as 42˚ for several days.

·       Pipes froze. If this happened with water in them, the water expanded and broke the pipes. Once they thawed, this caused indoor flooding. (We didn’t suffer as much cold; plus our pipes were not on outdoor walls. We were among the lucky.)

·       Water service failed in many areas, because of frozen pipes and water mains. In many areas, even with water pressure restored, most of the county was under a boil water order. Many areas got this order lifted on Sunday, February 21, but our area continues.

 

photo from Texas Scorecard

Thermal vs. Renewable Energy Sources

A couple of days into the disaster, we started hearing about blame and mismanagement. Up until then (with no internet or much other access to news), I was assuming it was just an overwhelming natural disaster—like Hurricane Harvey, or Ike, or the Tax Day Flood, or…. And, in the end, it is a natural disaster. But Tucker Carlson offered this rather obvious opinion: 

Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did.

More GW (gigawatts) were lost to fossil fuels than to wind. Because a larger percentage is provided by fossil fuels. But enough of wind power was down that, by percentage of expectation, wind was definitely a failure.

Here is Political Sphere’s take on it:

The numbers are not adding up. I am hearing from several sources that it is the fossil fuels, not the renewable energy, that has created our problems in Texas this week. A good example of this opinion journalism was published by the Texas Tribune under the headline “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages.” It opens noting that renewable energy sources were only expected to make up approximately 20% of the approximately 83.5 GW total capacity expected to be available this winter. This means renewable energy sources were expected to provide 16.5 GW of power (of that 16.5 GW only 6 GW was expected to come from wind).

16.5 Gigawatts is an interesting number. ERCOT, the agency responsible for ensuring the Texas grid, does suffer cascading power failures as other major grids across the US have done (think the Northeast power failure of 2003 that left 55 million people in the northeast United States and Canada without power for 2 full weeks during August of that year), reported that at its peak on Monday they were instructing service providers to shed 16,500 Megawatts (16.5 GW).

It is true, as pointed out in that Tribune article, that at its worst 45 GW of capacity was unattainable. Approximately 28 GW was from thermal sources (which would include both fossil fuels and nuclear) and 18 GW was from renewable energy sources according to the ERCOT officials cited in the article. The article and others use this to say that, see, a larger number of GW were lost overall from thermal sources than renewable, meaning that blaming it on renewables is wrong as the fossil fuel sources were a bigger problem. But this is a clear oversimplification, failing to take into account how much of a percentage of expected energy that is for each type. Going to our numbers above, we can see that we lost greater than 100% of the total expected capacity from renewable energy sources while only 42% of the expected capacity was lost from the thermal energy sources.

This is not to say that there were not some significant problems with the fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources; there clearly were. There will be an investigation find all the causes for the 4 million plus without power this week, and I am sure the investigation will discover there were many failures that led to such a massive inability to deal with this extreme event, but it appears that you cannot expect renewables to produce any energy during major crises and should prepare to have a hardened and ready replacement for every Gigawatt they are calculated to produce when energy production really counts.

 

Energy source	Expected	Unattainable	% Failure
Renewable (wind, solar)	16.5 GW (6 GW from wind)	18 GW	100%+
Thermal (oil, natural gas, nuclear)	67 GW	28 GW	42%
Total	83.5 GW	45 GW	54%

 

Political Sphere shared an analogy with me, about what the federal government was asking of Texas. Say you’re on the brink of a hurricane and need to hunker down very soon. But you need to resupply your bottled water, in case you don’t have water for several days. But the store says, “Before you can buy water here, you need to have tried buying water in a neighboring city at price gouging rates. Do that first.” So you do all you’re able. You find that the asking price is 83 times higher than your normal rates—if the neighboring cities had it to sell at that rate. But you find that water isn’t to be had in the neighboring cities either, because they’re facing the same likely natural disaster. [All states but Florida were hit with this polar vortex, and so was Mexico.] So then the store says, “OK, but only just enough to sustain life for a couple of days. Because we really don’t want you producing too much plastic waste, you know.” Yeah, plastic waste is the least of your worries during a hurricane. 

What needed to happen was, Texas should have gone ahead and added supply—assuming the permission would come. Because a small temporary increase in carbon dioxide was the least of our concerns when people were about to die of hypothermia inside their icy, flooded homes.

 

Conclusion

There’s one thing this disaster showed us: we’re pretty dependent on electricity. That makes us very vulnerable. It’s one thing to have a one-week outage; it’s another thing altogether to lose power for a much more extended period of time.

We need to protect our electric grid. This is, once again, an issue I’m doing some citizen lobbying on in the state legislature. Just this past week we finally got a couple of bills addressing it. If you’re in Texas and care to call your representatives about it, these are: HB 1731  and HB 1180. Neither is adequate. They mostly just look at the situation and hope to come up with a plan. But that’s a start.

The most urgent concern is not another polar vortex, which may not happen in our lifetime. It isn’t even increased need for energy during high temperatures, which happen every summer and are planned for. The most urgent concern is an electromagnetic pulse, which can be natural or manmade (terrorist or enemy military attack) caused, and which can result in loss of power for months. Loss of life would be tremendous. All our prepping and camping supplies would run out quickly. And the prevention could be accomplished at relatively small cost, passed along to consumers without additional taxes.

After a week like we’ve just had, I’d say protecting against loss of power is a pretty high priority. And Texas ought to be doing what we know we need—regardless of some federal bureaucrat crying foul. They do not have our best interests in mind; they’ve proved that.

 

Resources

·       “The Texas Power Outage Started with Bad Policy” Jason Isaac for The Cannon, Feb. 17, 2021. (This was possibly the clearest explanation I found.)

·       “Could Lawmakers Have Prevented Texas’ Blackouts?” by Robert Montoya for Texas Scorecard, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “We are ordering an investigation into ERCOT and immediate transparency by ERCOT.” Statement by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Feb. 16, 2021. 

·       Notice of Public Hearing of the Energy Resources Committee on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021, shared on Facebook  

·       “The Narrative is Overshadowing Truth in the Texas Energy Crisis” Erick Erickson, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “Did Frozen Wind Turbines Impact the Texas Freeze? Here's the Data” by Bryan Preston for PJ Media, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages” by Erin Douglas and Ross Ramsey for The Texas Tribune, Feb. 16 (updated Feb. 17), 2021. (This is the article Political Sphere referred to.) 

·       “Q&A on Texas Blackouts” Rep. Dan Crenshaw on Facebook Feb. 18, 2021 

·       “Texas was ‘seconds and minutes’ away from catastrophic monthslong blackouts, officials say” by Erin Douglas for The Texas Tribune, Feb. 18, 2021. 

·       “A Giant Flaw in Texas Blackouts: It Cut Power to Gas Supplies” Rachel Adams-Heard, Javier Blas, and Mark Chediak for Bloomberg, Feb. 20, 2021. 

·       “Texas Spins into the Wind: An electricity grid that relies on renewables also needs nuclear or coal power” Wall Street Journal editorial board, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “Tucker Carlson: The Texas Green Energy Disaster Is Coming to You Next” by Kipp Jones for The Western Journal, Feb. 16, 2021. 

·       “Joe Biden’s Dept. of Energy Blocked Texas from Increasing Power Ahead of Enduring Storm” by Adan Salazar for [your]News, Feb. 19, 2021.  (Facebook marked this as false according to independent fact checkers, but it does seem to coincide with information on the ERCOT website for February.) 

·       “Electricity Prices during the 2021 Winter Storm” Public Utility Commission of Texas winter storm price explainer 

·       “As Texas deep freeze subsides, some households now face electricity bills as high as $10,000” by Leticia Miranda for NBC News, Feb. 19, 2021. 

·       “Texas households face massive electricity bills, some as high as $17K, after winter storm” by Brook Seipel for The Hill, Feb. 19, 2021. 

·       “Texas utilities can't stick customers with huge bills after storm: Abbott” by Linda So, Jonathan Allen for Reuters, Feb. 21, 2021. 

 

Social Media Conversations among Texans Who Know Energy

·       “Here’s another ERCOT kick in the pants...” John Boggan live on Facebook Feb. 17, 2021  (On the video he says ERCOT was cutting power to the providers that natural gas producers who were providing fuel to the power plants—because they weren’t considered essential infrastructure.)

·       “So here is Biden’s dark winter… directed at us!” Christine Gagne, February 21, 2021 (near midnight, on Facebook) 

·       Bryan Preston Feb. 19, 2021 on Facebook  “One more nerdy chart and then I swear I'm done. ‘The wind turbines don't freeze in (pick your favorite very cold place) and shouldn't freeze in Texas!’ Right? Like Alaska, right?” (includes chart on Alaska’s energy sources)

·       Rolando Garcia, Feb. 17, 2021, on Facebook, passes along a Scott Friedman tweet from NBC5, suggesting ERCOT inspections were done virtually this year because of the pandemic. 

·       Mark Ramsey passes along a summary from Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, pointing out “every natural gas plant online at the start of this crisis stayed online.”