The powerful winter storm that fell in the continental United States this week devastated Texas with arctic temperatures that caused widespread blackouts, plunging millions into darkness as snow and record cold paralyzed the country’s second-largest state.
Republican lawmakers and right-wing experts opposed to the Biden administration’s clean energy policies had a chance to blame the growing use of wind power by the Lone Star State .
But even though production from all sources of electricity fell in Texas, frozen instruments at coal, nuclear and natural gas power plants, along with a limited supply of natural gas, were the main cause of the off, Dan Woodfin, senior director of the Texas Electrical Reliability Council, told Bloomberg News Tuesday. (ERCOT is the main network operator in the state).
Energy analysts and electricity experts said a total failure in planning for extreme weather scenarios caused the type of cascading disaster that runs the risk of becoming more frequent as climate chaos increases the pressure on human systems.
Ironically, wind power represented a bright spot for grid operators as the resource, which tends to decline during the winter months, exceeded daily production forecasts over the past weekend.
ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Transmission towers and power lines lead to a substation after a snowstorm on February 16, 2021 in Fort Worth, Texas.
“There’s so much misinformation and a ridiculous political advocacy that focuses on icy wind turbines when this is the piece of supply that ERCOT plans most realistically,” said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston. . “During the coldest day of winter, they only hoped to get a small portion of the wind and solar cake.”
By contrast, the grid operator planned to get about 90 percent of the electric charge from what it calls “firm and reliable resources” such as coal, natural gas and nuclear reactors, he said.
“It has been a failure that our‘ firm and reliable resources ’have not been firm or reliable when we need them most,” Cohan said.
From about 70,000 megawatts at gas, coal and nuclear plants, up to 30,000 megawatts have been offline since Sunday night, said Jesse Jenkins, an electrical expert at Princeton University.
“The main story remains the failure of the thermal power plants (natural gas, coal and nuclear power plants) that ERCOT has to be there when needed,” Jenkins wrote in series of tweets Tuesday evening. “They have failed.”
LM Otero / AP Customers use the light of a cell phone to look at the meat section of a Dallas grocery store on Feb. 16. Although the store lost electricity, it was only open for cash sales.
Complicating matters further, Texas homes are designed to keep temperatures about 30 degrees Fahrenheit colder than outside air during summers full of bubbles, and not to keep them warm during icy winters, he said. Joshua Rhodes, associate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin’s Webber. Energy Group. Now, heat loss is added to the growing demand for the grid.
“Everything in Texas is centered around maximum summer demand, when we all try to air-condition our homes and keep them 75 when there are 105 outside,” Rhodes said. “We have designed our homes for this difference of 30 degrees. But now our houses are trying to keep a 60 degree difference and are not designed to do that. It’s a losing battle. “
Under normal conditions, Texas network operators and utilities anticipate maximum demand during the summer heat. During the winter, many plants are kept offline and supplies are shipped elsewhere until air-conditioned air conditioners and refrigerator systems cause grid demand to grow by August. The blackouts now show that “demand forecasts were incorrect and were too low,” said electricity analyst Nick Steckler.
“It was a big mistake,” said Steckler, who heads the U.S. energy unit at energy research firm BloombergNEF, which is a separate company from the financial news network. “I can’t stress the extent to which available capacity exceeds total expected demand.”
On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) called for an investigation into ERCOT preparations, declaring the matter an emergency issue in this legislative session to “ensure that Texans do not experience power outages again.” the scale they have seen in recent days. ”
“The Texas Electrical Reliability Council has been anything but reliable for the past 48 hours,” Abbott said in his statement. “There are too many jeans without electricity and heat in your home, as our state is facing freezing temperatures and a severe winter climate. This is unacceptable.”
It was not just the fault of the network operator and the power plants. Gas pipeline utilities whose supply lines froze and even building designers and construction practices that limited insulation for cold weather made “Texas’ gas and electricity demand extremely sensitive. to cold weather events, ”Jenkins said your Twitter thread.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images Pike Electric service trucks line up after the Feb. 16 snowstorm in Fort Worth, Texas.
In that sense, the blackouts echo another recent climate disaster the Texans faced. After years of increasingly outward concrete expansion, Houston’s lack of climate planning left it vulnerable to catastrophic flooding when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017. At the time, Andrew Dessler, a climatologist and professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University told HuffPost that the storm offered “a taste of the future.”
It is still impossible to know whether this particular cold is related to climate change and there is lively debate about how much Arctic warming is weakening the forces of the stratosphere that normally keep frigid temperatures confined to northern latitudes. the earth. In 2018, scientist Marlene Kretschmer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that periods of a weakened “polar vortex” force had increased over the past four decades and corresponded to approximately 60% of the cold extremes in the part of the middle latitudes of Eurasia during the period. But researchers argued last year in the peer-reviewed journal Nature that there is not enough data to make definitive claims about the link.
Ethics and adherence to the facts, much less strict, guide what political opportunists contribute to the discussion of what is happening in Texas.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) shared a 2014 image of a helicopter defrosting a wind turbine in Sweden, calling it “a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources such as natural gas and coal”.
Opposite extremists of the billionaire right-wing media empire Rupert Murdoch managed to project a unified message that also blamed the icy turbines.
As for the most prestigious newspapers, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal – a body that has a desire to bend the facts for ideological purposes has angered journalists in its writing – attacked what it called “the paradox of the climate agenda the less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them, ”in an opinion piece titled“ A Deep Green Freeze ”.
As for populist television, Fox News star Tucker Carlson focused on wind turbines in his Monday night monologue: “Everything worked really well until the day it was cold outside. Windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and the people of Texas died. It’s not about hitting the state of Texas, it’s a fantastic state, it’s about giving you an idea of what’s going to happen to you. “
Carlson delivered himself in his usual way, providing the kind of confusing political misinformation on which audiences can now depend on subsequent disasters.
“There are always narratives that are very far from the reality that is happening,” Cohan said. “Gaslight is a good word.”
Sara Boboltz contributed to the reports.
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