In February 2021, millions of Texans lost power, and the state’s grid came within four or five minutes of a total failure that would have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. It’s hard to overstate the importance –– and complexity –– of our electric grid. But how did our most important energy network get weakened? And what can we do to fix it?
Tropical atmospheric river reaches California. Flooding possible in the south of the state.
JUST to be complete, we had events close to this in the years 1989 and also 2011. In 2011 it didn’t get as cold as 2021, but 1989 was in the same class as 2021.I lost yard plants/bushes in 1989 and 2021 due to the cold in those years. In 2011 there was an issue with natural gas supply AS IN 2021 too.
THERE WERE reports written for both those events too (1989 and 2011).
One notable difference between 1989 Texas and 2021 Texas electricity markets – Texas had NOT yet moved to a merchant electricity market yet in 1989.
You are correct. .The storm was not completely unique, except that it came along after TWC started naming winter storms as a scare mongering tactic.
The documentary (and the embedded news clips) call this specific event unprecedented, but they don’t specify the Houston-San Antonio- Austin region. Similar events occured in North Texas in around 1982 and again in 2002. Trees down from ice load in North East Texas, Oklahoma, and neighboring Arkansas and North Louisiana took down power lines. Texarkana power wasn’t completely restored for 10 days, or more in some areas, despite having plenty of generation capability on line throughout the emergency.
A couple hurricanes have had similar power outage effects during warmer weather.
Deregulation didn’t occur until after 2005, when wind turbine installations begin to pick up. IMO, ERCOT quit managing for customers, and started attempting to ride herd on an ncontrollable market. And, of course, there was Enron.
re: “Similar events occured in North Texas in around 1982 and again in 2002.”
Conflating ice events with extreme cold wx events? Not equal. I lived through all this, noting the effects and the temperatures. The cold wx were the ones that caused issues with nat gas wellhead freezeups, then power outages put nat gas processing and puming stations out of service. If you have not read the reports for those events (1989 and 2011), I recommend doing so as opposed to nooze media or other media presentations.
PS. The big ice events I’ve witnessed occur when surface temps exist just below freezing then overrunning warm air falling into the near and below freezing air at the surface accumulates ice. Temps after ice accumulation has fallen to the 20’s on occasion. The event in 2021 had snow first as a precipitation, and actually acted to provide an insulating layer and therefore provided some protection to buried utilities like water from the near zero temps we had in 2021.
Iced over Wind turbines do not generate electricity.
Agreed. I said “similar” and “not completely unique”. All caused power to be lost, heavy damage to grid infrastructure, and degradation of transportation and basic services. To me thhis qualifies the events as similar.
As someone else has pointed out, and was pictured in episode 1 of the documentary, wind farms and pv cells alike did not produce during the associated ice storms. In the earlier events, Ice was the major contributor, making the cold deadly — although not nearly as much as the 2021 event. Another similarity.
The big change to the grid between the ’80s and the ’20s was the reduction in overall thermal generation, with the inadequate substitute of unreliables. As Bryce and Co are pointing out in the documentary, the energy marketplace and regulation also changed drastically, in some part, based on the influence of the confidence game played by Enron and its government and industry successors.
The Enron bankruptcy was in 2001.
Yep. Read and view Robert Bryce’s work. Look at Meredith Angwin’s work, her book “Shorting the Grid.” and her interviews in the documentary and on Bryce’s YouTube. Enron’s influence effect on the regulation and makeup of Texas energy market lives on, and IMO the con was just picked up by ERCOT and energy producers. Unreliable energy sources, deregulation, and public-private-partnerships are just part of it.
The “renewables” lobby still wants to blame gas, not wind power, and has been gaslighting furiously. Misallocating investment in wind was the real problem, as wind produces no power in freezing rain and still air, no matter what weatherization was done or not done.
But gas is also a big problem. PJM almost went down Christmas 2022 because the gas fired system failed, as it did in Texas. Switching from coal to gas has dramatically increased the threat of cold weather. 1994 was much colder than storm Elliot in 2022 but we burned on site coal then so no problem. PJM had a supposed 30% reserve margin but relatively mild Elliot wiped it out.
We need to bring back coal.
There was also green virtue signaling that required electric powered compressors on gas pipelines. Coal and nuclear do have extended supplies of fuel onsite, so transport difficulties have much less effect.
The coal plant in Texas didn’t do too well during the freeze. 1.75GW tripped out (11,065MW down to 9,314MW) in the big cascading trip early on the 15th. Over the next 12 hours a further 1.6GW was lost. The low point was 6,274MW in the hour to 2 a.m. on the 17th.
Chart of coal, wind, nuclear and solar in ERCOT.
The failure of the turbines triggered a flawed load shedding program that shutdown the gas compressors supplying gas to power plants. Pipeline gas has a -40 dewpoint, and often lower if it comes from a cryo plant. Natural gas plants don’t “freeze” up as they run at -130F, and the feed gas has already been glycol dried.
And by-the-by, STP #1 (South Texas Project nuclear plant #1) is back to 100% output based on looking at both the NRC.gov website and the ERCOT ‘Fuel Mix’ dashboard.
Despite all of the gaslighting about lack of “winterization” being the issue, it was the automated shutdowns and the lack of reliable gas supply that allowed things to freeze up. And ALL OF THAT was driven by the face-planting of wind power, which they foolishly allowed themselves to become dependent on for roughly 1/3 of their “grid” power, after the wind died in the wake of the winter storm.
A coal or gas fired power plant in continuous operation generates enough heat to avoid freezing up, but shut it down (whether due to self-protection to deal with big frequency drops caused by a hole in generation or by lack of fuel due to ELECTRIC compressors in gas pipelines that lost power) and suddenly “winterization” becomes an issue very quickly.
The face-planting of wind power was the dominoe that set the whole thing in motion, period. (With an assist from the bone-headed idea to use electric, as opposed to natural gas powered, compressors in the gas pipelines.)
So, have they gone back to gas powered compressors for the gas pipelines?
Many compressors are near large metropolitan areas which are EPA Non-Attainment zones for various pollutants. This makes it virtually impossible to get air permits for engine driven compressors. Some operators design their facility power distribution to be able to plug in large diesel driven generators to enable at least partial emergency operation if the main source is down, but these are not on-site so you are looking at hours to days in terms of response time.
Which EPA requirements are more administrative state overreach based on junk science like “PM 2.5.”
Not just PM 2.5 (which gas is relatively imine to). It’s about NOx primarily.
Wow, I’d think people with no electricity especially in frigid weather wouldn’t mind a bit of air pollution to get their power back. I don’t imagine there would be all that much pollution. It seems to me that the real reason is to cut out that source of “carbon pollution” but they don’t want to say it- instead saying it’ll poison the air.
Unfortunately, “people with no electricity” do not get a say. In the EPAs mind they just do not know what is good for them.
No. They’ve tried to protect them from being cut off by automated load shedding.
Protecting them from load shedding can be difficult. It all depends on the grid topography.
If they are protected, then so will be other demand on the same substation. That may mean that other substations move up the batting order for cuts. Cutting demand is less likely to produce difficult grid configurations because it can be done is a reasonably geographically dispersed fashion, and in a planned manner, pre-evaluated. Cuts in supply could be much more problematic, because it could well be geographically concentrated, as with the location of wind farms relative to population centres. Also problematic can be the loss of key transmission links in a congested grid, which can lead to other links being overloaded and tripping out themselves and potentially creating a large frequency divergence both high and low that trips out a wide swathe of the grid: the biggest blackouts in the past 25 years (at least if we exclude countries like South Africa) have all been of this type.
I don’t know, but I doubt it.
So far a Google search doesn’t answer that question. The Texas gas system is unique in several ways, one is a just in time delivery system. Other systems have storage of gas.
Does Google not want us to know the answer?
“Does Google not want us to know the answer?”
Yes.
On that question, and many OTHER questions.
There’s a fair bit of storage at various points around Texas, and also next door in Louisiana. There was a 156bcf stock draw on the caverns in the week of 14th Feb. 2021. Part of the reason for it to be there is to cover for offshore production outages during hurricanes.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/66IkX/1/
All gas systems are “just in time” delivery the only margin is line pack. Most if not all systems rely on storage because usage peaks exceed production capability. Gas is stored (typically in salt caverns) in the off peak summer months and extracted from storage and injected into the system during peak usage winter months.
In Texas there are demand peaks in both summer and winter, with about 100bcf/month difference over spring and fall which offer shoulder seasons of lower demand. Texas gas production exceeds demand by a substantial margin, and in addition it provides pipeline routes to market for gas from New Mexico and Oklahoma. There are substantial exports by pipeline to Mexico, and as LNG around the world. Most of the domestic surplus is piped via Louisiana to markets on the Eastern seaboard.
In advance of the cold weather, supply to LNG liquefaction facilities and some other industrial demand was cut to maintain supply to support residential and power station demand. The storage drawdown in the South Central area during February totalled 300bcf – almost as much as Texan usage of 335bcf. Texas production was down by 290bcf in the month, or about 30%. The storage drawdown rate was exceptional with 156bcf in the coldest week. Normally the storage draw mainly supports higher demand in the Eastern seabord.
Looks like another example of hiring regulators and electing politicians based on ‘Equity’ rather than competence. Didn’t they learn anything from to Dr. King?
Correct. They ran out of dispatchabld reserve power, having already turned many plants up to 11. Running plant beyond nameplate comes with risks that it will malfunction. With the wind dying away the grid struggled to maintain frequency.ERCOT did start to mandate rolling blackouts, but demand stayed way higher than they expected for after midnight. They got caught out at 1:52a.m. when the loss of one station led to a cascading trip that knocked out a lot of power at once, and saw frequency dip to 59.3Hz at which point automated load shedding took over.
The loads shed included key gas compressors, starving several power stations of fuel in the process. Despite production problems from the cold weather there had been adequate supply of dry gas from storage to keep capacity fuelled until the cascading trip and automated load shedding. The real problem was having insufficient dispatchable capacity in the first place. That was at least partly because the reliability calculations assumed wind would be available when it wasn’t.
Good summary. Natural gas doesn’t freeze up. All the gas coming out of the Gulf is glycol dried, and the gas in storage is dried, Automatic load shedding caused the trip.
Other way round… the cascading trip caused automated load shedding. That prevented restart of some of the knocked out stations, as well as forcing others offline due to lack of fuel.
Yes and no. Production is wet and subject to freeze-up. It is not just about freezing water it is about the formation of hydrates that can clog and shut down gathering systems.
gas extracted from storage is wet and subject to hydrate freeze until it s dried. Even the water outlets on the driers can be subject to freeze.
The reality of the gas system is that a lot of facilities and pipelines are built by investment companies to sell. Build it fast, cheap, cut every corner you can, find a auxker to sell it to and walk away (counting your money).
Gas is not put into storage until it has been dried. There are lots of reasons for that.
The compressors didn’t “lose power”. They were intentionally tripped due to a flawed load-shedding plan, which included half the cooling water pumps at the nuke plant.
She’s a wise old girl. ##
As attached, she’s telling exactly what is going on inside the UK grid and what offshore windfarms are up to – it’s more obvious than an obvious thing.
And our muppet politicians have walked right into it.
But they ain’t muppets, they have eyes on nice cushy directorships, consultancies and seats-on-the-board when they’re given the electoral boot
The System is rotten to the core – (just like all our teeth and for the exact same reason)
##
Dec 89 I had processed in at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio and gotten the family settled in a rented house off post as we had a six week wait for on post family housing.
I had been assigned as one of seven SF qualified instructors at SOMED, which at that time was the longest (32 weeks) of the three phases of SF medic training and which other Special Operations types like Sr. Seal corpsmen and Airforce PJs, and other special ops medics sometimes attended.
I was anxious to go see the school house and report and meet the other instructors and scope out the situation.
Because of the weather all the schools were closed but I still wanted to go in and check it out.
So I had broken starch on a set of BDUs and was watching the local news as I polished my jump boots.
The stupid stuff they showed Texas driver doing in the snow and Ice convinced me I should stay where I was. I took off my BDUs and played games with the wife and kids instead.
SF, SOMED, SF, BDUs, BDUs
I bet that whatever it is that you are trying to say is really interesting.
SF= Special Forces
SOMED= Special Operations Medical Course
BDUs= Battle Dress Uniform which is the equivalent to fatigues. The every day work uniform for the majority of soldiers who not working in an office job.
Breaking Starch= putting on a laundered and starched set of BDUs.
BTW SOMED no longer exists since they moved the course to Ft. Bragg. We few SF medics that got assigned to that course wore a flash on our berets that is very rare in SF. It was created for SF medics that during the Vietnam war were specially trained in entomology and in rare parasitic diseases at Walter Reed to go behind enemy lines including into N Vietnam to do surveys. Basically long range medical reconnaissance missions.
The Flash designates the specific unit a soldier is assigned to.
Sounds like SNAFU prevailed?
While we’re on the subject of terminology, let me clear something up. US Army Special Forces are the ONLY Special Forces. All others, Seals, Air Force PJs (Para rescue) etc are properly referred to as Special Operations Forces.
DELTA is administratively under the Army Special Operations Command (U.S. Army SOCOM) at the JFK center at Ft. Bragg but operationally under the command of United States SOCOM ((US SOCOM) at McDill, AFB.
Marine Fleet Recon units are not special operations troops. Some however are trained and rated Special Operations capable.
Now you know more than 95% of the so called journalists.
Funniest experience I had with army acronyms was my first bivouac when our corporal poked his head in our tent and said –
“you, you and you – come with me. We need to CTP”
(which I later found out meant Check The Perimeter)
But one of us new recruits piped up (seriously) –
“who’s ‘T’, and why do we need to watch him pee?”
The WSJ reported that the day before the storm Texas (stupidly my view) was getting 45% of its electricity from wind & solar – on the day of the storm that percentage went to 8 – so the answer is simple – don’t rely on unreliable sources for your electricity
Yup. And that message needs to be POUNDED, perhaps done with a large hammer, into the head of every idiot politician that wants to expand unreliable sources while shutting down reliable sources
The wind dropped well before the peak cold.
While the media takes part in the blame game for the black out there is one simple fact they overlook …. energy delivery was fine until they added renewables. Why is it so hard to understand the source of the problem?
In the Marxist universe, the consensus of the Party is truth and reality; the physical universe is mostly imaginary. Recall how well this worked for the Soviet Union and for Mao’s China. With such evident and outstanding successes as examples, only a fool would challenge the system. After all, whatever was left of the family of such a fool had to pay for the bullet.
How did it happen? Load shedding natural gas pipeline booster compressors that were fueling power plants. Load shedding half the cooling water pumps to the nuke power plant, causing it to shutdown.
Also interesting in the ERCOT post-report, besides calls to establish “critical infrastructure” in load shedding, was a recommendation to retain “experienced” personnel, and to have “experienced” personnel on shift during emergencies. I wonder who was on the team that put together the load shedding plan.
I’m guessing a lot of Gen-X dudes that got passed over for advancement due to DEI left ERCOT.
It seemed to me as though ERCOT had the A-team managing the grid in the afternoon and evening, when they anticipated demand would be at maximum and they needed to be prepared. The B-team came on at about 10p.m., and you can immediately spot the frequency beginning to sag becuase they failed to implement power cuts swiftly enough to ensure there was always adequate reserve in the event of a trip.
They opted for a wing and a prayer and no reserve, and nearly lost the whole grid, but were in effect saved by the automated load shedding. Here’s the lowest frequency print I was able to find:
http://web.archive.org/web/20210215075245/http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_conditions.html
59.334Hz, and it almost certainly went below 59.3Hz.
Please give me a reason to watch it. What is it in the first place?
Texas is a shining example of what happens to an electric grid once the wind and solar penetration rate is above 20%. The grid is so unstable and unreliable that the $billions wasted on W&S must be matched with $billions invested in dispatchable natural gas energy to make it functional and safe.
Texas decided on November 7, 2023, that unreliable and intermittent wind and solar had resulted in the death of enough of their citizens and passed into law a Bill providing $10 billion of incentives for the construction of natural gas-fired electrical generation. Noteworthy is the legislation specifically prohibits funding battery storage, an even wore waste than wind and solar.
Details
Voters passed a constitutional amendment Tuesday (November 7,2023) that creates the Texas Energy Fund, injecting $10 billion of public money into energy infrastructure, including $7.2 billion for companies that want to build power plants in the state.
The biggest chunk of that money, $7.2 billion, would go into low interest loans and incentives to power companies to build natural gas power plants.
The plan was proposed by lawmakers as a way to improve Texas’ electric grid by increasing what they call “dispatchable” energy sources. That’s a power plant you can turn on when needed — one that’s not dependent on wind or sun to generate electricity.
… some of the lawmakers who championed the proposal said their goal is to put the brakes on renewables and subsidize natural gas power plants.
It’s worth noting that money from the Texas Energy Fund is prohibited from funding big battery storage projects, like grid scale batteries.
One of the key failures leading to the Texas blackouts was started, I believe, by President Obama’s team. To supposedly reduce gas consumption, they urged pipeline operators to remove natural gas powered pipeline pumps and replace them with electrically powered pumps. Pumps are required every 100 miles or so along a pipeline to keep the gas flowing. Natural gas was chosen to power these pumps by the original designers (using a tiny portion of the gas being pumped) as the most reliable choice. Otherwise, the pumps would need electricity from the very plants they are supplying which introduces many other reliability and efficiency issues. It is not at all clear that the selectric pump scheme saves any gas at all and may, in fact, consume more. Unfortunately for the 200 to 900 dead as a consequence of the Texas freeze and blackouts, the pumps were changed to electricity starting roughly a decade ago. Compounding the problem, ERCOT failed to keep track of the circuits feeding electricity to these pumps and during the crisis, needing to “shed load”, a euphemism for cutting off your electricity, shut down electricity needed to otherwise keep about half of the States natural gas supply flowing. This included the gas supply to several gas powered electricity generators which in turn promptly shut down leading to even more blackouts. This is what happens when politicians and incompetent bureaucrats decide to engineer your electricity system and your gas system instead of capable and competent engineers.
Electric mainline gas compressors have been the norm since the late 80s – I am a retired pipeline designer. But you are right – the reliance on electric compressors is a major problem if the electricity is not available. Don’t know if dual fuel system is feasible at that power consumption level.
There are so many issues involved in this mess it is hard to know where to start.
Number one nothing and I mean nothing takes precedence over reliable, dependable and affordable power. The very first question that should be asked of any proposed power generation project is can you deliver energy when it is needed in the amount that is needed? Those that can are moved to the head of the line. Those that can’t are moved to the back.
Number two what is becoming more clear is what I will call a store of fuel. Those processes that can store fuel are preferred, those that can’t are less preferred. A pile of coal is an obvious store of fuel. Nuclear generators go years before they need to be refueled. Their store of fuel can’t be seen as easily as a pile of coal but is there nonetheless. Hydro has a store of fuel that is easy to see but there are limits as to how far a reservoir can be drawn down. The reservoir is easy to see. Natural gas is referred to as a just in time resource. That is fine but I still consider that it has a store of fuel. The fuel is not stored on site so the delivery system must be strong and protected. Things like the EPA or some other bureaucracy interfering with how the system is protected is unacceptable. Keep the delivery system strong and natural gas can be counted as having a store of fuel. Wind and solar have zero store of fuel that is why they need to store energy for when there is no fuel.
Number three a strong dependable grid can not be compromised. It should never be made to accept power from sources that can’t deliver when needed in the amount needed. There can be no compromise here.
Follow these simple rules and we will all have a better and safer life.
If at first you don’t succeed-
EV Madness: Electric Buses are a complete DISASTER | MGUY Australia – YouTube
double down on the disaster-
First all-electric “trackless tram” arrives in Brisbane for testing (thedriven.io)
Got the aircon preconditioning at the charger folks? Now for aircon battery drain in transit in a Brissie heat wave with a heap of sweaty humans jumping on and off. Next brainfart!
Batteryfication is thirsty business it seems-
America’s $232 billion lithium industry could drain billions of gallons of water from Colorado River and residential wells because Civil War-era law doesn’t limit how much mines can use (msn.com)
Leftys don’t do tradeoffs but only deal in absolutes.
Assigning this to my Offshore Technology students this weekend. Discussions next week.
Why Texas ever set up its energy grid the way it did, with few outside links and over-reliance on solar and wind power that cannot sustain winter heating needs during these winter storms baffles me. All I see is one big tax credit capture and accounting tricks to put those into the market to cash them out. We had plenty of good, functioning coal plants. Now they’re all gone thanks to that Bat-Eared Kenyan and his Dementia-Ridden sockpuppet. Just ask any of our relatives in Northern Europe or South America how they feel about this “green” energy. It stinks!
Would love it if someone could write a high-point summary of the video. I just don’t have time to watch it right now.