By Robert Bradley Jr. — February 20, 2024
“The Kiesling/Giberson (et al.) narrative is a call for more government. MORE wind. MORE solar. MORE Batteries. MORE central planning to correct prior. And rationing from ‘smart meters’ to forgive all that came before. Think Big Brother, the Electricity Road to Serfdom.”
Three years ago this month, a prolonged, extensive cold snap did the unthinkable to Texas’s huge electricity grid. The shared narrative from proponents/apologists of forced energy transformation (‘Energy Transition’, ‘Decarbonization’, ‘Net Zero’, ‘Green New Deal’, ‘Virtual Power Plant’) focused on the failure of natural gas infrastructure as the cause of the debacle, a sort of “market failure” from “an Act of God.” The cancer in the system, intermittent wind and solar ($66 billion worth), was forgiven, and central planning of the state’s grid by Austin politicians, regulators, and administrators was treated as a neutrality.
Faux free-market advocates Lynne Kiesling and Michael Giberson pushed this false narrative, refusing to get from the physical why to the analytical why. Bad analytics, bad historical interpretation. And their recommendation: more intervention, not less, coordinated by government agents.
Background
Wiki summarized the physical side of the event:
In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered a major power crisis, which came about during three severe winter storms sweeping across the United States on February 10–11, 13–17, and 15–20. The storms triggered the worst energy infrastructure failure in Texas state history, leading to shortages of water, food, and heat. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without power, some for several days. At least 246 people were killed directly or indirectly, with some estimates as high as 702 killed as a result of the crisis.
The human and economic toll of the Great Texas Blackout is in the books. But the “why-behind-the-why” of the unprecedented debacle has been neglected, even by “free market” electricity specialists wed to the state’s ISO central planning model.
Getting back to fundamental causality requires a lot of analysis beyond the simplistic surface effects. It brings in a worldview of free-market processes and government intervention. As I concluded in a counter-analysis the month after the event, “Renewables ‘Market-Failed‘ Natural Gas in Texas:
The second draft of history is pointing toward a massive government planning failure in America’s second most regulated industry (next to money & banking), as well as the intended and unintended consequences of pro-renewable, anti-fossil-fuel decarbonization policies. There is much more evidence to come, but the picture is getting clearer.
I updated my initial thoughts on the second anniversary of the debacle: “Wind, Solar, and the Great Texas Blackout: Guilty as Charged.”
Unreliable capacity that never should have been built crowded out the reliables—as intended by “magical thinking” policymakers. Storm Uri was not the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was the moment that showed the animal’s back was badly broken.
The way forward is the opposite of what the UT-Austin authors recommend. Wind, solar, and batteries should no longer receive government advantage. The wholesale power grid now run by ERCOT should be denationalized and mandatory transmission rules rescinded. Third, franchise protection and other “public utility” regulation should be removed for the denationalized grid, a program outlined elsewhere.
Central planning for a forced energy transformation produced the debacle of debacles two [now three] years ago in Texas. It is time for a new era for U.S. electricity policy, premised on market entrepreneurship.
Specifically,
- Wind and solar predictably disappeared at the (weather-generated) peak
- The reliables were wounded by (artificially) low margins created by the take policies of ERCOT (the central planning agency) in light of the (very low) marginal cost of wind and solar. Pricing for reliability under such central planning failed.
- On-the-shelf winterization technology behind a number of gas-well freeze-ups was not in place from a variety of government interventions (forced disintegration, artificially low margins/prices, and government weather-forecasting error). The 1989 and 2011 experiences with gas freezing went unlearned and unheeded thanks to non-free-market distortions.
- Central planning errors from monopolistic ERCOT (covering 90 percent of the state), which replaced utility control and the “obligation-to-serve”, was a Hayekian planning failure.
- Forced/jawboned electrification of gas compressor stations from natural gas fell victim to power cutoffs (also see here).
- Climate model prediction and NASA/NOAA forecast of a warm winter in general and specifically for Texas, respectively, misled the market.
The narrative of natural-gas failure as market failure has been weakened by ERCOT’s repeated conservation alerts since the February 2021 debacle (example here). Wind, solar, and batteries are rushing in, and politics is Texas trying to subsidize new gas-fired capacity in the face of renewables’ predatory pricing. Will a duplicated centrally planned grid be the solution?
Conclusion
It is not a coincidence that the worst event in the history of the U.S. electricity market occurred in the state most hampered by government intervention. It was predicted by free marketeers and not predicted by the wind/solar apologists.
Blaming natural gas in a market where natural gas was wounded by predatory renewables is disingenuous. Worse, the Kiesling/Giberson, et al., narrative calls for more government. MORE wind. MORE solar. MORE Batteries. MORE central planning to correct prior. And rationing from “smart meters” to forgive all that came before. Think Big Brother, the Electricity Road to Serfdom.
Requiring weather dependent source providers to make arrangements for backup power, or pay the spot price for failure to deliver, would make wind much less of a cash cow for the subsidy mining investors.
The subsidies and other regulations distort the market. But as the Green Blob are socialists, they regard it as market failure, despite the actual cause being those regulations.
UT Austin is as crazy blue as UC Berkeley or UW Madison. Unsurprised at this new screed. It’s all they got left. And they remain unridiculed in their bubble world.
Can I toss in Ann Arbor, Michigan too.
Sure. And Cambridge Massachusetts, especially the western half.
You can’t fight propaganda with facts when you are denied an audience.
“Bigger than Texas”
is a term that is commonly used as a descriptor of things that dwarf other similar things in scale.
Is the search now on for candidates for the biggest failure of wind & solar powered grids ever experienced, that will be “Bigger Than Texas”?
Which grids come to mind?
Like every green problem, there’s a great solution just around the corner corner and it just needs a lot of belief, fingers crossed and of course $$$$$
In the words of Journey – Don’t Stop Believin’
Gas well freeze-ups is the BS excuse cooked up by the leftists. Gas from the Gulf is glycol dried and is the bulk of the gas. Gas from storage is spec gas and can’t “freeze up”. Yeah, some po-dunk wells froze. Zero impact.
What caused the black out was a stupid load shedding plan which intentionally shut down the natural gas pipeline compressors feeding the power plants, AND the load shedding of HALF the freaking cooling water pumps at the nuke. When the wind turbines failed, ERCOT implemented their load shedding plan and made the problem worse as gas fired plants no longer received gas. Instead of being honest, the inept chuckleheads started screaming about “frozen wells!”.
Furthermore, the natural gas pipeline compressors USED to be driven by reliable natural gas engines and turbines, basically self-fueled. These got replaced by electric motors due to Climate Hoax regulations.
Natural gas at the wellhead can freeze from water vapor mixed in BEFORE the h gas is refined and impurities removed. Once refined and placed in a pipeline, no temperature I know of on earth will freeze the refined gas.
Temperatures can get low enough to trigger so-called freeze-offs, when wells shut down because of liquids freezing inside pipelines.
Ice can block gas flow, clogging pipes. It’s a phenomenon called a “freeze-off” that disrupts gas production across the US every winter.
Freeze off are not fiction
The electric compressors made the gas shortage worse but were NOT the cause of the 2021 Texas blackout
Your post is mainly fiction.
Another thing made the gas shortages worse as well…
Per WIKI…
In addition to equipment problems, demand for electricity in Texas hit a record 69,692 megawatts (MW) on February 14 — 3,200 MW higher than the previous record set in January 2018 and 12,329 MW higher than its current capacity of 57,000 MW.
Demand was so far above capacity that gas couldn’t keep up with demand after Wind Generation froze up and gas had to try and take up the slack.
Demand was 122% of capacity
I don’t think that’s right. Here’s the demand forecast vs generation and demand outturn. The problem was that they had sanctioned maintenance – not expecting a winter freeze – leaving them very short of capacity. There are higher generation records from summer heat waves.
What is true is that they forecast a big surge in demand to ~75GW on the 15th that they never had a prayer of satisfying.
You’re all over James D on this. Extreme weather gas deliverability needs to be planned from the sand face to combustion. Well heads can hydrate over before the gas even gets out of the ground, requiring downhole chemical injection. Then, the well site might need both gas production units and dehydration right away. That gas might need chemical injection right after, and then, when it is field compressed, more conditioning. Finally, the flow needs to be remotely monitored almost continuously thru custody transfer.
Texas producers do not build for these conditions – but they easily could. Especially with currently available remote monitoring and control technologies, and with shut in prioritization for the required electric power. They need to be well rewarded for doing so, even if these capabilities are not often used. That way- in concert with renewables – this vital bridge fuel would be available when needed, and the reserves of it would last longer.
JamesD is however right. Although there were production losses onshore, the combination of offshore (processed on landing) and storage was doing the job of keeping the power stations supplied. Until the pipeline compressors were taken out. That happened in reaction to the cascading trip at 1:52a.m. that sent grid frequency down to 59.3Hz, triggering automated load shedding and removing control over the process from the control room (as if they knew what they were doing – they didn’t, as subsequent investigation showed they had no idea which circuits were critical to gas compressors).
The cascading trip was caused by the lack of reserve to defend against a plant trip – i.e. a shortage of dispatchable capacity. The control room had gambled on not having a trip that would trigger a cascade, and lost. They should have imposed power cuts sooner, to keep reserve to handle trips: the overall loss would have been far less, and would have been controllable and rotatable to share out the impact. However, as they had no idea that their power cuts would likely cut supply to gas power stations they were left with little choice of which hill to die on.
Gas usage was way up. Solar and wind were way down. What kind of logic is used to come to the conclusion that the problem was gas and not wind/solar? Climate activists know as little about logic as they do about physics and chemistry.
Story tip : Ask the regulators why the cooling water pumps at the nuke tripped. They’ll say “weather related”. Ask them if they were load shed.
That really is unlikely: the plant generates more than enough of its own power for its own facilities, even when half of it tripped out – plus it would have diesel backup in case of a full scram in order to maintain control of the operation. I think many nuclear plant engineers agree that the cause was instrumentation failure on the water feed pressure gauge for one of the units caused by freezing of its supply pipe, leading to a trip on safety grounds.
“”…the “why-behind-the-why” of the unprecedented debacle has…””
been consigned to the memory hole. Bad facts, bad message, bad news
Most of Texas’ gas plants which went off line tripped off because of grid because of grid instability, not because they were frozen up,
And we all know where that instability came from!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/02/24/texas-blackouts-critical-new-data-revealed/
Texas had a simple problem with a simple solution that the author missed.
The Texas gas producers had very little incentive to weatherize for a few cold days every decade. A poor investment.
The natural gas power plants needed to back up 100% of windmills and solar — a known deficiency — had to operate reliably under all weather conditions.
In Texas that meant every gas power plant needed gas storage tanks for a few days of supply for the coldest days of the year when gas production declined.
Or else there would not be enough just in time gas to meet the full demand from every gas power plant in Texas, at least for a day, or a few days.
The problem was first recognized in the 1980s. The 2011 blackout affecting 3.5 million Texans made it clear that just in time gas and very cold Texas weather were still a problem that coud be fixed with on site gas storage tanks.
ERCOT decided to financially subsidize building windmills instead. True bureaucrats.
So the same gas problem exists today.
It caused a blackout in 2011 with few windmills and a blackout in 2021 with lots of windmills.The only common factor as unusually cold Texas weather.
The federally mandated switch to electric gas pipeline compressors, and the fact that 2021 Texas weather was colder and lasted longer than the 2011 cold weather, both made the 2021 blackout worse than the 2011 blackout. But they did not cause the blackouts.
Windmills and solar panels require 100% natural gas backup. If that backup fails for any reason it’s not an engineering failure mode of the windmills or solar panels,
The failures in Texas, and eventually with Nut Zero, are caused by bureaucrats pretending to be grid engineers.
Anyone with common sense would think that if wind and solar need 100% natural gas backup, then why waste money on windmills and solar panels. Just use natural gas. The windmills and solar panels are redundant. Bureaucrats don’t think that way. Too logical.
“The federally mandated switch to electric gas pipeline compressors, and the fact that 2021 Texas weather was colder and lasted longer than the 2011 cold weather, both made the 2021 blackout worse than the 2011 blackout. But they did not cause the blackouts.”
The electrification of the natural gas to electric infrastructure would have happened no matter what. The advantages, from lower fuel and maintenance costs, to improved control and monitoring, are just too alluring to resist. And that power would mostly be there for them no matter what, if it were properly prioritized during extreme weather events.
Aks any pumper whether he prefers watching his wells and field facilities – between his regular beats of course – on his laptop or phone. or taking the emergency phone calls. He might also prefer electrically powered and controlled chemical pumps over the polluting gas powered Kimrays, of which he has several in his garage requiring rebuilds.
Electric pumps may indeed have several advantages over NG combustion powered pumps, under normal circumstances, most of the time. But if your electrical grid depends on NG to operate reliably, then I would suggest that under no circumstances should your NG distribution infrastructure depend on grid electricity. At the very least, how about backup NG powered pumps for when the electricity fails? Because it will… (I would also buy the idea of diesel powered pumps, but as long as you have the NG in your pipe at the pumping station already, why not use it?)
“….but as long as you have the NG in your pipe at the pumping station already, why not use it?”
A good, fair question. 2 reasons. NG controls or powered equipment is not as controllable or monitorable. And the natural gas at those sites is almost never properly conditioned, even for “normal” use. For example, field water concentration is usually controlled to 7lbs/million standard cubic feet of gas. But for reliable fuel and residential use, it should be less than 0.5 #/mmscg. H2S specs for field lines v fuel and residential use are similarly different.
You have properly targeted many of the Texas 2/21 problems…
Problems with onshore production, but not with supply of dry gas ex storage and ex offshore supply and processing, which is what the generators were using.
The “generators” used gas from all over. Largely from the onshore sources that produce most US gas. To use it, it had to be conditioned to residential specs. What is under discussion, by everyone, is the onshore field equipment, that used onshore, relatively unconditioned gas, to get that gas to the “generators”.
It really was no more of a problem than a hurricane shutting down offshore production: you use the storage to cover for the production shortfall. What everyone should be looking at is whether the storage was adequate. IMHO, it was plenty sufficient to meet the demand that presented, with 156bcf of storage draw in the Southern area in the week of the storm. However, if the full demand had been met the storage might have been stretched. Check out the chart I posted showing the ERCOT demand forecast vs actual supply above.
Some figures:
a 1GWe CCGT station will use 2GW of gas at full output. 5 days storage x24 hours is thus 240GWh or 864TJ of gas. At 40MJ/m^3 that’s 21.6mcm, or at 50 bar 432,000 cubic metres of storage. A spherical gas tank diameter 40m is just over 10,000m^3, so you’d need a pretty large tank farm as gas. As LNG, you can divide the 21.6mcm for storage by ~600 to get 36,000 cubic metres of LNG. Plus all the associated plant to liquefy and gasify it, and the round trip cost of doing so.
Much better to use the caverns and linepack.
The failure is introducing worse-than-useless wind and solar into the grid at all, BECAUSE they need 100% backup.
And as much as “investment” to “weatherize” for relatively infrequent cold spells may not seem “worthwhile,” funds to make such “investments” are non-existent when billions are being squandered on worse-than-useless windmills and solar panels.
The 2021 blackout probably wouldn’t have occurred without the face-planting wind and the load shedding and shutdowns that resulted. There was no gas *supply* issue in 2021, just an inability to reliably *pump it* to the gas plants. Oh, and if course if all that money pissed away on worse-than-useless wind and solar was instead used to build additional gas (or coal) plants to keep up with demand.
Onsite methane storage for a power station? The only places where that occurs are fed with LNG from a neighbouring port. Gas storage is a combination of salt caverns and linepack: there is no real advantage to making the storage onsite because it would be very costly to compress to LNG and have LNG tankage. Where gas supply may be at risk, some stations can switch to alternative fuels (diesel or jet usually), but the whole station has to be designed with that in mind. There is an efficiency penalty in having the flexibility.
Very nice Robert.
Get the government out of the energy production and transmission business. The government’s only function is to lightly regulate the energy business. By that I mean declare that affordable reliable energy must be available for business, manufacturing and residences. 24/7 availability is a requirement not a luxury. Energy produced as clean as practical.
This debacle should serve as a reminder to overly-enthusiastic but under-realistic green proponents that wind and solar still have a multitude of limitations and that fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear are currently the only way to ensure a safe, reliable and consistent energy supply. Maybe if and when the technology improves to the point that large-scale storage batteries can be counted upon to power entire towns and cities will wind and solar be able to claim a larger slice of the energy sector, but at present they’re far from being able to do so. As a result, governments should quit over-subsidizing them until there’s more evidence that they’re up to the task.
There is no “if and when” Intermittency is a fatal flaw, and batteries give minutes or hours where days and weeks are needed.
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
Who knew that Mike Tyson would become a leading philosopher of our times?
I appreciate these comments. Another part of the story is that the ‘obligation to serve’ got lost in the transformation from traditional public utility regulation to the central planning agency, PUCT/ERCOT.
If a private company fails to meet its contract for gas or for electricity, that company has its capital on the line for damages. ‘Force majeure’ would not apply if the technology was there to have prevented it. Integrated operations are designed to handle reliability much better than a lot of arm’s length contracts where gaming and force majeure can result.
As it was, ERCOT got off from its planning errors due to sovereign immunity.