Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Here were two problems, one short term and one long term—which exacerbated the short-term one.

The short-term failure came at about 1 a.m. Monday when ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures, and arranged for more generation.

Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (in the ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.

This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.

In the last four to five years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today.

We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar, which is cheap for two reasons—it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.

Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to a total of 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity statewide, though they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity.

Wind and solar, with state and federal subsidies, have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market.

Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.

“Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.

What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.

Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.

Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

“There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money,” he added. “About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.”

As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?

But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.

The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.

Snip.

On the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts. The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heat waves.

Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter. Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.

We knew solar would not produce anything during the night, when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar. This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.

“By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid, and wind generation bottomed out at 2 [percent] of installed capacity by Monday night,” said Jason Isaac, director of Life:Powered, a project of Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former state lawmaker.

“Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts—inconvenient but manageable—instead turned into 4 million Texans left in the cold and without answers,” he continued. “To make matters worse, ERCOT shut down power at natural gas substations in the Permian, leading to further shortages.”

Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has since said Texas should stop building wind turbines; focus on gas, coal, and oil; and called for the firing of Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees to the Public Utility Commission—the government body that oversees ERCOT.

But was this crisis foreseeable? Isaac says yes.

“We’ve known for years that a weather event combining low wind and solar production and record demand could lead to blackouts,” he told Texas Scorecard. “This week, that event became a reality as new wind and solar generation failed to produce when it was needed the most, and it appears ERCOT fell asleep at the wheel.”

For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.

When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.

Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.

So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.

Here’s the long story.

Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.

However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.

Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)

The ERCOT grid is a very complex beast. It can’t call on other grids for support (but that is a bit overrated as typically when you need power so does your adjacent region, but that’s later).

2/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

ERCOT is a 501c3 nonprofit that is charged with managing the market, but above all, reliability (keeping the lights on). In my experience some of the smartest people I’ve ever met work there. Wish I could name some of them because they’re absolutely brilliant.

4/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

2) they’re smaller lines and substations. So trees, squirrels, and snakes can cause an outage.

Transmission is 69kV and up.

6/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

Retail guys, municipalities, and cooperatives are the guys who buy power wholesale and sell it to the end user (residentials, commercials, industrials).

Retail outside of municipal or cooperative areas can shop for a retail provider.
8/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

Getting really in the weeds but I’m getting there.
10/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

This year, ~20,000MW of (gas and coal) Power plants requested an outage. ERCOT runs an outage study looking at demand and other available resources, and then says yes. (They make sure all the plants in Houston aren’t out for example because that would jack up Houston rates).
12/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

If those plants could be back up they would’ve because they want to make big money.
So, Feb 11th, we go to bed, wake up to a coating of ice. This ice is thick and persistent.
Next day, sun is out, roads are good. Maybe we’re through the worst?

14/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

Then Feb 14, snow.

Then the temps drop to single digits.

On the night of the 15th, between midnight and 3 am, 8000MW of gas, 1200MW of Nukes, and 2000MW of coal trip off the grid. Culprits are frozen gas pipelines and water for steam. (Note the Big gas drops)

16/ pic.twitter.com/T7DuAyaTWf

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

I think here he’s conflating a few different things; it’s unclear how much capacity was taken off line due to insufficient weatherization and how much was caused by ERCOT foolishly inducing blackouts in the gas-producing Permian Basin.

So no water through the pipe, no steam. No gas no gas to heat that water.

That trip caused a lot of the outages and most of the outrage.

18/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

So ERCOT’s only options in these situations is:
1) cut off a big chunk of the customers.
2) let the whole system trip and take months to get back to normal.

So they disconnect grandma.

It sucks. But it’s their only hope.
20/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

Almost done. So, what the fix?

Depends. Is it worth it to winterize a plant?

Cost of winterization = X

Benefit = $9000/MWh x hours we’ve had this pricing (80?) x MW at the plant

Is Benefit > Cost???

22/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

Last thing. In 2011. We had a bad winter but it was followed by a drought and the worst summer ever. Power plants didn’t have water in their lakes to run the plant. 100 days over 100°.
The grid focused on that issue instead of the cold.

So, I guess we’ll see how this goes.
23/

— Gomes (@GomesBolt) February 19, 2021

Nationally, retail electric sales generated $117 billion in 3Q2022, $10.9 billion in Texas (of which $6.3 billion was residential) and $14.5 billion in California. 2/12

— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 23, 2021

If Texans paid what Californians did for electricity, Texans would have paid $13.2 billion more, or about $508 more per person in the state for those three months in 2020. 4/12

— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 23, 2021

One aspect of Texas’ failure has been the rapid grown of unreliables (wind and solar) subsidized by federal and state policy concurrent with the shedding of reliable power (coal and natural gas). 6/12

— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 23, 2021

We suggest making all electricity producers guarantee dispatchable power for Texas’ grid—this means that the unreliables would have to secure agreements… 8/12

— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 23, 2021

All this understood, it will be instructive to see how California and the Western Interconnection fares this July and August when… 10/12

— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 23, 2021

Texas may have a similar challenge due to overreliance on wind power and the atrophying of Texas thermal generation. 12/12

— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) February 23, 2021

Mitchell Rolling explains: “As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.”

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 and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.

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. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.

This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.

One of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.

Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.

Snip.

As the graph plainly shows, wind generation choked down but natural gas compensated. Coal and even nuclear power generation dipped. Solar generation has been negligible due to cloud cover and several inches of snow and ice.

The cold has created extreme demand across the state. During most winter storms, the Panhandle, West Texas, and even North Texas around Dallas and above toward Paris may get cold but Central and South Texas could remain well above freezing. This has not happened during the current series of storms. The entire state is in a deep freeze, with snow appearing even on Galveston Island’s beach. Galveston averages lows of about 50 degrees and highs in the mid-60s during a typical February. It’s 37 degrees in Galveston as I write this, well below average. Austin has seen single-digit temperatures at night.

To put all of this into some perspective, the storm that dumped more than six inches of ice and snow on Austin Sunday night would, by itself, have been a historic storm. It dropped more snow on the capital than any other storm since 1949. It was preceded by a major cold snap and has been followed by more extreme cold and then another ice and snow storm Tuesday night. Texas has not suffered a single historic winter storm over the past several days, but a series of them without any warming in between…

Add to all of this, when Texas gets winter storms it usually doesn’t just get snow. Snow is fairly easy to deal with. Texas also gets ice, which can snap electric lines and break trees and tree branches, which also can fall on and break power lines. A tree in my yard is bent over by ice to the point that it looks like an invisible hand is holding it down. We can expect the ice to kill off millions of trees around the state. The ice layers also render most roads impassable. All of this is very unusual for Texas, but not unprecedented. The winter of 1836 was notably harsh; Santa Anna reportedly encountered deep snow as he marched his army toward San Antonio.

Most winters, Austin will have a few cold days but no snow. Central Texas is known to go entire winters without anyone having to so much as scrape any frost off their car windshield. Austin has had two significant snowstorms in 2021, with the current one being historic by any measure.

Piecing known information together, the wind turbines in Western Texas froze up starting Friday before the icy snowstorm hit, on Sunday night to Monday morning. This destabilized the Texas grid ahead of the worst of the storm. The storm produced the temperatures and precipitation the forecasts expected, but with weakened power generation and demand skyrocketing to heat millions of homes, homes which for the most part are not insulated against the current level of cold temperatures, the grid was set up to suffer mightily as it’s not hardened against extreme cold such as this once-in-a-century storm series is delivering.

This sums up what you want to know about power shortages in #Texas! Timeline matters. Researchers must start from Feb 9.
Have solar & wind failed? YES, starting Feb 9.

Have backup #natgas plants failed? Yes, starting Feb 14. Yet, Natgas generation still way higher than before pic.twitter.com/AKa6M0neZw

— Anas Alhajji (@anasalhajji) February 17, 2021

Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But the pumps use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.

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.

Liberals claim that prices of renewables and fossil fuels are now comparable, which may be true due to subsidies, but they are no free lunch, as this week’s energy emergency shows. The Biden Administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.

Decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies that favor unreliable wind power are crowding reliable energy sources out of the market, weakening the grid, and leading directly to the blackouts we experienced last week.

It’s no surprise — in fact, Texas came close to seeing widespread blackouts in August 2019. Our reserve margin, the buffer of extra electricity between what Texans are using and what we can produce, has become steadily smaller in recent years. And without quick action by state leaders, it will only get worse.

We should eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies — especially unreliable wind— to allow the free market to function smoothly. We must prioritize reliability and affordability in our electricity choices. Unfortunately, that’s not politically popular. But these are steps we can and must take for our state’s future.

Here's Texas Power Outage Apocalypse Bingo…

Hope y'all win, even if by candlelight, and stay safe! pic.twitter.com/zNkvToAPmU

— Evil MoPac (@EvilMopacATX) February 16, 2021