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FYI, Eric
* ENVIRONMENT<https://www.thenation.com/subject/environment/>
* ENERGY<https://www.thenation.com/subject/energy/>
* TEXAS<https://www.thenation.com/keyword/texas/>
The Real Reasons Texas’s Power Grid Is So Vulnerable
What’s happening in Texas is not an indicator that renewable energy is less
reliable—it’s a signal that our infrastructure is frighteningly unprepared for
extreme weather.
By Zoë
Carpenter<https://www.thenation.com/authors/zoe-carpenter/>Twitter<https://twitter.com/@ZoeSCarpenter>
TODAY 5:00 AM
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[texas-power-crews-ap-img]<https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/texas-power-crews-ap-img.jpg>
Oncor crews work to restore power to homes in Euless, Tex., February 18, 2021.
(Michael Ainsworth / AP Photo)
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Millions of people across Texas have now spent as many as five days without
electricity and water, thanks to a blast of Arctic air that plunged much of the
Southern Plains into bone-chilling temperatures and overwhelmed the state’s
power grid. The reasons the system failed are complex, though that’s not the
impression you’d get from Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and other conservative
politicians and media personalities, who’ve spent the week blaming one
particular scapegoat: wind turbines.
Carlson, the most-watched anchor on cable news, claimed Monday that a “reckless
reliance on windmills” caused the grid failures. “The windmills failed like the
silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” Carlson said. In
the days since, windmill hysteria has ping-ponged across conservative media,
with various commenters and politicians framing the crisis as a dire warning
about the folly of renewable energy. “This shows how the Green New Deal would
be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott
told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were
collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into
a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.”
Ten percent is, of course, not very much. And in reality, wind energy accounts
for very little of the crisis in Texas. Some wind turbines did freeze. But it
wasn’t just that one part of the electrical grid that failed—the entire system
was unprepared for the extreme weather, which caused demand to spike (as people
needed more energy for heat) and throttled supply, as gas wells and pipelines
froze, and power plants shut down<http://www.apple.com/> because of the cold.
Coal and natural gas account for for more than 80 percent of the state’s power
capacity, and as Princeton University energy systems engineer Jesse Jenkins has
documented, failures related to those sources of energy accounted
for<https://twitter.com/JesseJenkins/status/1361695199924215813> a far more
significant share of the problem than did frozen turbines. Roughly 40
percent<https://twitter.com/JesseJenkins/status/1362160723552579595?s=20> of
the capacity that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the
state grid, was depending on from thermal sources (gas, coal, nuclear) simply
wasn’t available. If there’s one primary culprit, according to ERCOT, it’s
natural gas
providers<https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/>. In
The Texas Tribune, Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the
University of Texas at Austin, described the failures of the natural gas
industry as
“spectacular<https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-frozen/>.”
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Particular features of Texas’s grid may also have made it more vulnerable to
the extreme weather. To avoid federal regulation in the 1930s, Texas formed a
system independent from the two major grids that serve the rest of nation,
meaning that it can’t draw from its neighbors during an emergency—though that
may not have helped in this case anyway, since much of the surrounding region
is also experiencing high demand due to the weather. More significant is the
fact that Texas deregulated its electrical system in a way that promotes fierce
competition between power suppliers. That pushes prices down for consumers, but
it also discourages investment in maintenance and winterizing measures (like
insulating pipelines), which the state has left largely
voluntary<https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-failures/?utm_campaign=trib-social-buttons&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social>.
“It’s like not taking care of your car,” Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the
Department of Economics at the University of Houston, told the Houston
Chronicle. “If you don’t change the oil and tires, you can’t expect your car to
be ready to evacuate, let alone get you to work.”
If you had been watching Fox News, however, you’d be under the impression that
Texas is some kind of green-energy experiment gone horribly awry. “Texas gets a
taste of Dems’ radical climate vision,” read one Fox chyron. “Winter storm
cripples Texas’ green energy
grid<https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1361828654792212481>,” claimed
another. Carlson went as far as to say that the state had become “totally
reliant” on windmills. Various Republican politicians joined in the
scapegoating, including Senator Ted Cruz, Senator John Cornyn, and
Representative Dan Crenshaw, all of Texas and who collectively received more
than $1.1 million from the industry in last election cycle, according to
Gizmodo<https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-much-the-oil-and-gas-industry-paid-texas-republican-1846288505>.
Senator Steve Daines, a Republican from Montana, shared a viral photo
purportedly of a helicopter deicing a turbine in Texas, though it was
actually<https://earther.gizmodo.com/viral-image-claiming-to-show-a-helicopter-de-icing-texa-1846279287>
taken several years ago in Sweden.
Breitbart<https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2021/02/15/half-of-texas-wind-turbines-freeze-hurting-electricity-output/>
piled on, as did commenter Dan
Bongino<https://soundcloud.com/dan-bongino/the-biggest-lie-of-all-1>, and the
more patrician voice of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which
blamed<https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deep-green-freeze-11613411002> a “growing
reliance on wind and solar” for the grid’s failures (though the paper’s own
reporting
contradicts<https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-blame-wind-for-texas-electricity-woes-11613500788>
that claim) and concluded that “the Biden administration’s plan to banish
fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.”
But what’s happening in Texas is not an indicator that renewable energy is less
reliable, or that climate change is insignificant: It’s a signal that our
infrastructure is frighteningly unprepared for the kinds of extreme weather
events that are driven by climate change. As Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez put it<https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1361903282667589634?s=20>,
it is “quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal.”
Research
suggests<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/02/15/us/winter-storm-weather-live?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytclimate%23climate-change-may-be-why-frigid-weather-has-slid-so-far-south-experts-say>
that warming in the Arctic is destabilizing the jet stream, allowing the polar
vortex to shift southward. While there’s still uncertainty as to the extent to
which climate change is responsible, unexpected deep freezes in places like
Texas are just one in a long list of extreme weather events expected to
destabilize energy grids and other critical infrastructure affecting
transportation, housing, communications, water, and other basic systems.
Just six months ago, our screens were filled with otherworldly photos of
tangerine skies and clouds of smoke, as wildfires engulfed much of the West
Coast. Now the photos are of icicles dripping off a ceiling fan in the hallway
of an apartment building in Dallas. Juxtaposed together, these images sum up
the “new earth weather<https://twitter.com/cmrtyz/status/1361810299603443715>”
we have to contend with. Making our infrastructure more resilient is possible,
but it will require significant investment from lawmakers. In addition to
demonstrating the real human costs in failing to adequately prepare for extreme
weather, the Texas crisis also illustrates one of the greatest barriers to
doing so: a right-wing media ecosystem and a Republican Party more committed to
absurd culture war narratives than to governance.
Zoë
Carpenter<https://www.thenation.com/authors/zoe-carpenter/>TWITTER<https://twitter.com/@ZoeSCarpenter>Zoë
Carpenter is a contributing writer for The Nation.
