Texas crisis a wake-up call for the power grid

The rare deep freeze in Texas that left millions without power this past week forebodes greater challenges for the U.S. power grid in a future where extreme weather is more common and the economy relies increasingly on electricity to fuel vehicles and heat homes.

At its peak, the extreme cold snap in Texas left more than 4 million without power for multiple days and forced offline more than 180 power plants unable to withstand the wintery conditions. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, finally lifted emergency conditions Friday morning once temperatures began to warm slightly, and it was able to bring the lights back on for most Texans.

The crisis has drawn the scrutiny of lawmakers in Congress, federal regulators, and state officials, all of whom have pledged to determine the root causes and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Politicians were also quick to say their least favorite energy resource, whether renewable power or fossil fuels, was to blame.

The reality is every energy resource failed, and the grid was ill-equipped to deal with the unusually cold temperatures that caused energy demand in the state to spike to levels rarely, if ever, seen during the winter months.

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Energy experts say the crisis in Texas should be a massive wake-up call to officials to reform the power grid.

“You don’t need any mathematical modeling to show that the frequency and the severity of extreme weather has been increasing, whether it’s wildfire or heat wave or flood or storm,” said Arshad Mansoor, CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute. The independent electricity research firm released a report last month finding grid planners largely aren’t considering extreme climate scenarios.

“If a one-in-100-year event is happening every year, then maybe it’s no longer a one-in-100-year event,” he added.

The electricity grid, however, isn’t prepared for these more extreme weather events, which scientists say are worsening due to climate change.

While the United States has learned from extreme events in the past, such as determining to build power substations on higher ground after Hurricane Sandy so they aren’t as vulnerable to storm surge, it’s always “reactive,” Mansoor said.

“The design basis of the grid was based on the weather normal we had 50 years ago,” he added. “That design basis will have to evolve.”

Policymakers should be figuring out ways “to send the right price signals” to power plants “to make sure they’re prepared for resiliency as opposed to just focusing on least cost operation,” said Lori Bird, director of the World Resources Institute’s U.S. Energy Program.

Many of Texas’s power plants faltered because they weren’t mechanically prepared to handle freezing temperatures like power equipment in the Northeast and the Midwest is. Texas energy providers, though, have little financial incentive to make potentially costly upgrades to winterize their power plants because cold-weather events are rare in the state.

Redesigned power markets could reward efforts power providers take to bolster resilience to extreme weather or offer incentives for plants to make those upgrades without losing competitive edge.

Another way to bolster resilience, Bird said, is to build out new transmission lines to carry power. That is particularly important for renewable energy, which is often generated away from city centers, and those lines can allow regions during emergency events to pull in power from places that aren’t affected.

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But as the grid grapples with building up resilience to extreme events, it is also undergoing rapid change.

The grid is incorporating more renewable energy as costs come down and policymakers seek to address climate change. In addition, policymakers, including President Biden, are asking more of the grid as they push to electrify the transportation and building sectors quickly to slash emissions further.

All of that puts new stresses on the grid, as operators work to balance variable wind and solar power and scale up the amount of electricity it’s providing.

“From 1880 to 2020, 140 years, electricity use as a percent of end use went from zero to 20,” Mansoor said, referring to the energy used to fuel vehicles and heat buildings. Most researchers say to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, electricity will have to become 40% or 50% of end-use energy.

“How could you make that happen if the resiliency of the grid is not at a different level?” Mansoor added.

Integrating more renewable energy onto the system can pose its own challenges to keeping the lights on because grid operators must make sure there is enough easily dispatchable backup power for when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. That means, in part, ramping up the grid’s battery storage capacity.

“Without storage, in my opinion, there’s no way we can have that high level of generation from wind and solar,” said Chanan Singh, a grid reliability expert and electrical and computer engineering professor at Texas A&M University. “And that storage can also help during periods of emergency.”

Nonetheless, without long-duration battery storage available, grid operators will be looking to natural gas or, potentially in the future, small modular nuclear reactors to balance out that load because they’ll need something that can last if resources fail for days as they did in Texas, said Ken Medlock, senior director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy’s Center for Energy Studies.

“I know there’s a big movement that we can do all renewables, electrify everything, no gas, and maybe someday, we can, but technically, right now, we can’t,” Medlock added. He pointed to the fact that during the Texas crisis, the federal government was sending diesel generators to the state to keep the lights on at hospitals.

“Diesel is probably the worst of all of the things you could do, but it’s what we had to do in order to get power to critical locations,” he said.

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More broadly, energy experts say they hope the Texas crisis raises the urgency of upgrading the grid.

“People don’t think about the grid when things are just fine,” said Le Xie, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Texas A&M University. He said there aren’t enough people thinking about how to redesign the grid to make it sturdier, able to withstand extreme weather, and deliver more power more cleanly.

“The cool job is to design the next-generation battery. The cool job is to design the next-generation solar panel,” Xie said. “But we also need the cool job to be that invisible infrastructure that keeps all things in concert.”