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“A historic winter storm has killed at least 21 people, left millions of Texans without power and spun killer tornadoes into the U.S. Southeast on Tuesday.” Reuters
“While ice has forced some turbines to shut down just as a brutal cold wave drives record electricity demand, that’s been the least significant factor in the blackouts, according to Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid. The main factors: Frozen instruments at natural gas, coal and even nuclear facilities, as well as limited supplies of natural gas, he said… Wind shutdowns accounted for 3.6 to 4.5 gigawatts -- or less than 13% -- of the 30 to 35 gigawatts of total outages, according to Woodfin. That’s in part because wind only comprises 25% of the state’s energy mix this time of year.” Bloomberg
The right argues that it is important to maintain coal, nuclear, and natural gas capacity to improve grid reliability.
“What we are experiencing is the ‘perfect storm’ disrupting our energy supply and creating an extreme stress test for the power grid that is being pushed to the limits. Yet, there is one source of energy that is, thankfully, keeping us from mass power outages and keeping the lights and the heat on: coal…
“Here are the daily numbers during the big freeze in the 15-state Midwestern region: Coal is producing roughly 41,000 megawatts of electricity; natural gas is providing 22,000 megawatts; wind and solar are roughly 3,000 — or about 4 percent of the power. This points to the foolishness of states requiring 30, 40 or even 50 percent of their power to come from wind and solar. Even with normal weather patterns, when wind and solar are working, coal-fired plants are almost always necessary as a back-up when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun not shining.”
Stephen Moore, The Hill
“Blame a perfect storm of bad government policies, timing and weather. Coal and nuclear are the most reliable sources of power. But competition from heavily subsidized wind power and inexpensive natural gas, combined with stricter emissions regulation, has caused coal’s share of Texas’s electricity to plunge by more than half in a decade to 18%…
“California progressives long ago banished coal. But a heat wave last summer strained the state’s power grid as wind flagged and solar ebbed in the evenings. After imposing rolling blackouts, grid regulators resorted to importing coal power from Utah and running diesel emergency generators.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
Many also argue that “The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come. That cold reality contradicts the ‘electrify everything’ scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons…
“But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather…
“Thanks to excellent geology, a century of gas production, and a fully developed transmission and distribution grid, the domestic natural gas sector can deliver surges of the fuel that are, in fact, lifesaving. That is due, in large part, to the fact that we can store vast amounts of gas and only tiny quantities of electricity. In short, our electric grid simply cannot deliver the massive amounts of energy needed during the winter to keep us from freezing to death. That means we need to keep burning natural gas.”
Robert Bryce, Forbes
“New York governor Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order for at least 9,000 megawatts (MW) of offshore wind by 2035. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy is calling for 7,500 MW by that same year. Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have all proclaimed their goal of 100 percent emissions-free electricity as soon as 2030. But placing one’s electric eggs in an offshore wind (and solar) basket will be a prescription for a wintry disaster. Besides snow and ice, a nor’easter can produce gale-force winds. (The turbines shut down once winds reach a prescribed level, usually 55 mph.)…
“Imagine that, during a nor’easter, most of those planned offshore turbines are shut down. Solar panels won’t be generating power either; even if they did, solar power is limited in winter because there isn’t much daylight to work with. These same states tout battery storage as a method to keep the lights on. But building enough battery storage to supply New York for four hours during a nor’easter would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and that’s before considering the policy proposals to switch all end-use fossil-fuel consumption—for transportation, heat, and hot water—that will increase the demand for electricity several times over…
“The New York Independent Systems Operator, which runs the state’s high-voltage power grid and coordinates the operation of generating plants, estimates that during high-demand winter days—such as during winter storms—the demand for electricity would be around 23,000 MW. To meet that demand for just four hours would require 132,000 MWh of battery capacity. At $625/kWh, that translates into an $82 billion investment in battery storage. In a sane world, the recent experience in Texas would be a red flag for offshore wind advocates.”
Jonathan A. Lesser, City Journal
The left urges investments in renewable energy and modernizing the country’s grid.
The left urges investments in renewable energy and modernizing the country’s grid.
“In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service… The temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000… One utility company, Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills…
“Some turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter. But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six…
“The immediate question facing the Texas power sector is whether its participants are willing to pay for the sort of winterization measures that are common farther north, even for a once-in-a-decade spell of weather.”
Will Englund, Washington Post
“Wind turbines — like natural gas plants — can be ‘winterized’ or modified to operate during very low temperatures. Experts say that many of Texas' power generators have not made those investments necessary to prevent disruptions to equipment since the state does not regularly experience extreme winter storms…
“Heather Zichal, CEO of the industry group the American Clean Power Association, said opponents of renewable energy were trying to distract from the failures elsewhere in the system and slow the ‘transition to a clean energy future.’ ‘It is disgraceful to see the longtime antagonists of clean power – who attack it whether it is raining, snowing or the sun is shining – engaging in a politically opportunistic charade misleading Americans to promote an agenda that has nothing to do with restoring power to Texas communities,’ she said.”
Erin Douglas and Ross Ramsey, Texas Tribune
“Modernizing the electrical grid to make it more resilient, more efficient and more secure is the worst kind of challenge: complex, expensive and easy to ignore. The complexity is largely a function of local ownership and local regulation of electrical utilities. They see overall demand for electricity leveling out, thanks to more efficient homes and businesses, which means a future without growth for their bottom lines. Because a grid is only as strong as its weakest member, major improvements would require every local utility to make major investments despite the no-growth outlook…
“Congress and the Biden administration should set standards for efficiency and reliability that local utility companies must meet, and provide grants and other financing to pay for upgrades…This is more than a matter of comfort in a cold snap. Intelligence agencies warn that the United States’ power grids are increasingly vulnerable to attacks from hackers sponsored by foreign adversaries. Hardening the nation’s electrical supply against cyberwarfare is clearly a federal responsibility and a matter of national security. It only makes sense to engineer a more efficient, flexible and reliable electricity network at the same time.”
David Von Drehle, Washington Post
“Climate change will stress energy grids in ways that are all too real, part of a vicious cycle from burning prodigious amounts of fossil fuels. Thanks in no small part to decades of lobbying from fossil fuel interests in shifting the country to the right, federal investment in modernized infrastructure that could better deal with that stress has been severely lacking…
“Transforming the grid for the twenty-first century demands exactly the kind of public-serving administrative creativity that fossil fuel political spending has tried to eradicate: not just to transition off fossil fuels—letting power providers accept as well as distribute power, building out transmission lines to get electrons where they’re most needed—but to make cheap and clean power available everywhere in the country…
“The real message of this week’s episode in Texas is not that renewable power is inherently unreliable. Nor is it that wind can just pull all the weight on a grid (it can’t). The message is that a system that is supposed to be the tip of the spear of decarbonization is buckling under the weight of stresses that will soon look mild, as we see ever-greater changes in weather thanks to global warming.”
Kate Aronoff, New Republic
