Texas Must Fix Its Chronic Power Grid Resiliency Issues Or Risk Becoming Another California

As I write this on Monday afternoon, I am sitting in the dark in my electricity-devoid home, hoping the battery power on my computer will hold out until I’m able to finish. Our area north of Mansfield in rural Tarrant County has been without power since about 6:00 a.m. due to the extreme arctic weather that invaded the state Saturday night, placing the entire state of Texas under a formal winter storm warning for the first time since such warnings have been a thing.

Oncor, the state’s main electric infrastructure provider, was so overwhelmed with calls early in the day that the company simply stopped answering individual outage reports so employees could focus on getting things back up and running, leaving customers with no idea when power might be restored. At the moment, millions of Texans all over the state are in the same boat we are in, and gaining a better understanding how people in California frequently feel.

The last time anything like this happened in Texas was a decade ago, on February 2, 2011, when ERCOT, the manager of the state’s power grid, was forced to implement rolling blackouts during a similar freak round of cold weather. The proximate cause of that situation was ultimately identified to have been instigated when several giant coal-fired power plants froze up in the midst of near-zero degree temperatures. The grid would have survived those outages had the state’s natural gas and wind capacity been able to remain up and running, but the majority of the wind turbines in West Texas also froze up, as did several major natural gas pipeline systems.

After a round of hearings and investigations, state regulators recommended retrofits and equipment upgrades that were supposedly designed to prevent a replay of those blackouts. Yet, as millions of Texans sit in their cold homes today, the replay has arrived with force.

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Part of the issue this time is the fact that wind plays a much larger role in the state’s grid, providing roughly 23% of the overall power delivery in the state as opposed to just half of that a decade ago. Increases in wind capacity, along with the retirement of several of the state’s fleet of coal plants allowed wind to surpass coal in terms of total deliveries last year, second only to natural gas. Reports are that at least half of the state’s wind turbines have again frozen up in the midst of 3-6 inches of snow and temperatures in the single digits above zero.

But that is far from the only problem at play.

Kinder Morgan reported Monday afternoon that it is experiencing capacity constraints at various points along its gas delivery systems. If KMI is having issues, it’s a safe bet other natural gas providers are as well, which in turn will cause power delivery issues for natural gas power providers.

Gasoline prices will also be spiking in the wake of this cold blast, as most of the major refineries along the Houston/Beaumont/Port Arthur corridor reported reduced operations Monday. Motiva, the Saudi Aramco-owned facility that is the nation’s largest refinery, said it was shutting down its operations entirely in response to the weather emergency. ExxonMobil , LyondellBasell and Marathon Petroleum , all reported reductions in throughputs at their plants.

The wake of the blackout situation of 2011 saw proponents of the various energy sources all taking shots at one another. Wind advocates pointed at natural gas; natural gas advocates pointed at wind; and everyone took shots at the coal plants. I was as guilty of that as anyone at the time, and all of that rhetorical hot air only served to confuse the situation and place counterproductive incentives on policymakers, whose resulting “solutions” implemented at the time obviously haven’t really solved anything.

In the wake of this current emergency we are already beginning to see opinion writers and industry advocates hitting the Internet with blame-shifting and finger-pointing rhetoric. As a long-time advocate for natural gas myself, the temptation is certainly there to point my own finger at all those frozen-up wind turbines on the plains around Abilene and Big Spring. But what does that really accomplish? Wind is a major and integral part of the ERCOT system and is going to remain there. Besides, as pointed out above, it doesn’t tell the full story.

So long as the knee-jerk to blaming the other guy remains our first instinct in the wake of emergencies such as this one, Texas runs the risk of moving down the path to becoming just another power generation basket case, a la California. That isn’t good for anyone who lives in Texas and wishes to remain here. As a 7^th generation Texan myself, I have no intention of going anywhere.

My hope today is that everyone who is involved in any of the state’s key power-generation industries will take a step back from the temptation to engage in finger-pointing and blame-shifting, and resolve to spend the coming days and weeks working openly and productively with the state’s regulators to arrive at real and lasting solutions to the power sector’s obvious chronic resiliency issues. Only by doing that can we avoid becoming another California and ensure that millions of Texans aren’t sitting in the dark in their cold homes again when the next big freeze event hits, whether that be a decade from now, or maybe next year.