Amid a Polar Vortex slamming the central United States, Texas (and Texans) are facing an energy crisis — with greatly increased power (electricity demand) with lowered supplies (about 30 gigawatts of electricity production offline), massively peaking prices, and customers (users, homes … some four million or so) without power amid seriously cold weather (and thus potentially risking freezing due to lack of electricity heat).
Almost exactly the same thing occurred a decade ago.
The key points from a decade ago are true today:
1. The blackouts occurred due to cold-weather causing traditional power plants to go offline, starting with two of Texas’ largest coal power plants. Water intakes froze, requiring the plants to shut down. Natural gas lines faced risks due to moisture in pipelines, leading them to shut off. …
2. Wind power production has met (and, it seems, actually exceed) its commitments to the Texas power grid — wind-power has been producing its promised electricity service, unlike coal and natural gas systems. …
2. In line with Governor Perry’s dreams of secession, Texas’ electrical grid remains the most independent of the regional grids in the United States from the overall electrical system. Other states’ power production [cannot] feed in to compensate for Texas’ inability to meet its own requirements and help keep Texans warm and out of the dark.
Today, just like a decade ago, fossil fools do not want people to understand what is really going on and are falsely blaming renewable energy and clean energy efforts for the outages. In Texas, today, natural gas power generation has gone down because of frozen pipes and other problems. There also gigawatts of coal and diesel generation that are offline. In addition, there are many wind turbines that are not producing power because of freezing frozen (perhaps 10-20 percent of the fleet) but the remaining turbines are outproducing the expected production and thus renewables are contributing more electricity than ERCOT had expected. The real story: fossil fuel systems are failing while renewables are delivering. Regrettably, that is unlikely to be the tweet you see or headline you read.
Click Bait Media At Play?
While much of this deception is due to fossil fuel propaganda and propagandists, there is an element of ‘click bait’ media culture at play. As Ketan Joshi makes clear in this twitter thread. (Update: broader Joshi article.)
It isn’t just about active fossil foolish propagandists but about passive and active collaborators — many either too lazy to get to the truth or too interested in clicks to care about it.
A decade later, the same conclusion
Now, the key takeaway from Polar Vortex Texas 2021 is exactly the same one from Polar Vortex Texas 2011:
While it will take awhile to track exactly what happened in Texas and why, the early honest lesson to identify is not a need to reject 21st century technology and double-down bets on an inadequate system but the importance of increased investment in American infrastructure, the need for intelligent interlinking of the national grid, and the value of a Smart Grid to help manage disasters — whether natural, man-made, or both.
Notes:
Painfully, those dealing with fossil-fuel propaganda have it easy in one way: the same falsehoods and misdirections are used time after time. Thus, debunkings don’t have to take a lot of energy to be modified to be accurate.
Regrettably, these falsehoods and truthiness talking points show up time after time because they work.
UPDATE Notes:
- There was also a 2014 event (here too) (and a somewhat similar event in January 2018) with fossil fuel thermal systems forced offline due to cold weather conditions — even as wind farms produced electricity. E.g., three major events in a decade with an eery similarity. Seems that Texas energy system (not uniquely) has a lot of resiliency investment required (including more anti-freezing investment in wind turbines as occurs in upper Midwest) in face of mounting climate-chaos challenges.
- After writing this piece, reports are out that wind fell below the production ERCOT planned for/relies on (while solar is overperforming). However, to be clear, ERCOT plans for thermal plants to meet about 90% of winter demand and wind for <10%. The thermal plant outages are far more serious than any wind production shortfalls. However, as per above, three severe weather events in a decade certainly indicate that Texas should be looking to ‘cold harden’ for resiliency its generating capacity (including wind turbines).
- An interesting public discourse overlap is to consider how Texas (Republican) politicians and conservative media pundits attacked California governance as a failure for electricity challenges in the face of massive climate-chaos driven wildfires but don’t have similar things to say about Texas’ governance as Texans risk freezing in their homes.
Compare that GOP and RWSM messaging with what you will hear from Democratic leadership.
4. Re ‘compare’, consider how Trump attacked California (Puerto Rico, …) when it faced climate-chaos worsened disasters and slow to no implementation of Federal Emergency with President Biden’s thoughtful words related to a rapid announcement of a Federal Emergency for Texas (Texans) and others suffering amid this massive cold blast. “Unity” isn’t about getting everyone to agree in Congress to weakened down legislation but having someone in the White House who works for all (ALL) Americans, whether or not they or their state voted for him/her.
5. For some good background discussion re ERCOT (and the huge price spiking going on), see Mark Sumner’s Messing with Texas: The Lone Star state’s power grid is working exactly as designed and (linked in discussion above) John Tinder’s Texas’ power grid crumples under the cold at Ars Technica. See also Brad Plummer’s A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids, New York Times and, especially, Kate Aronoff‘s (typically) great Conservatives are Seriously Accusing Wind Turbines of Killing People at the New Republic.
6. The amount of (Republican) fossil-fueled hypocrisy and deceit (with implications for bad policy making) re what is going on with the Texas energy situation is hard to exaggerate.
Here are a few more examples:
- Senator John Cornyn – Frozen wind turbines hamper Texas power output, state’s electric grid operator says https://statesman.com/story/news/2021/02/14/historic-winter-storm-freezes-texas-wind-turbines-hampering-electric-generation/4483230001/
- Senator John Cornyn – Rolling blackouts in Texas and spiking gas and power prices amid a cold snap show the folly of eliminating natural gas—and coal. https://wsj.com/articles/a-deep-green-freeze-11613411002?reflink=desktopwebshare_twitter via @WSJ
- Sen. Kevin Cramer – Texas is a real-time example of why we need reliable sources of energy like coal, oil, nuclear, and natural gas. It’s a shame the Biden Administration appears hell-bent on weakening these industries, along with the safety, security, and economic benefits that come with them.
- Sen. Steve Daines – Texas is frozen solid as folks are left w/ no power to stay safe & warm. This is a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources like natural gas & coal. These blackouts would be devastating to MT. No heat & no power simply are not options in the dead of winter.
- Rep. Lauren Boebert – Rolling blackouts from ND to TX have turned into lengthy power outages in freezing conditions. Biden needs to lift his oil & gas ban as we need reliable energy sources. The Green New Deal was just proven unsustainable as renewables are clearly unreliable.
- Rep. Jeff Duncan – A true “Climate Czar” would be in Texas right now looking at the shortcomings of intermittent wind and solar power generation during a climatic event. Severe weather reiterates the need for an all-of-the-above energy strategy.
- Rep. Roger Williams – The blackouts caused by this extreme weather reinforces the need to maintain energy independence and increased Texas oil and gas production, not less.
- Rep. Guy Reschenthaler – Wind turbines throughout Texas are frozen and not producing the electricity needed to keep Texans safe and warm. This is a look into the future for all Americans if President Biden and radical environmentalists have their way.
For some reason, I suspect Brian was being just a little bit sarcastic here:
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1 Media complicity with fossil fuel deceit: Texas Freeze Edition // Feb 17, 2021 at 2:49 pm
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