“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” –— Rick Perry
You’ll recall that he was most recently the US Secretary of Energy in the Trump administration. Yeah. Before that he was the Governor of Texas for two terms.
This Washington Post article by a Texas resident takes a look at the history of the electric grid and demonstrates that it has actually had its benefits, not the least of which is the fact that its independence allowed it to experiment successfully with renewables. That Perry and Abbot and other throwbacks are using this emergency as an excuse to end that experiment makes it even more despicable. And the way they do “surge” pricing is nothing short of scandalous, much like the “Aunt Millie” Enron scandal in California 15 or so years ago.
Here’s the conclusion:
Ultimately, this outage, like many of the biggest blackouts before it, reflects the challenge of unanticipated events and consequences. In 1965, power system experts felt sure they had built in enough redundancy to prevent any cascading power failure from ever happening. But they did not envision the way dozens of different operators would respond when one relay setting caused unexpected power movement across the networks. In Texas, we know that our summers will be exceedingly hot, pushing our power system to the limit, but the last time it was this cold was in 1989, and this year’s winter storms will last longer. Our wind turbines do not have the cold protection that turbines do in the cold north. Our overall system is not winterized. The conditions of this cold front and its effects on the power system were simply beyond what power experts generally planned for.
From my chilly living room, I can reflect on our state’s unique approach to power systems, both the benefits and the shortfalls, and simply hope that we will learn quickly from this weather event. No doubt there will be accusations, investigations, pontifications and extrapolations in the weeks and months to come. Surely, we can plan for our weather extremes more effectively, winterize our system more thoroughly, back up our renewables more completely, and (dare I say it?) ask customers to pay more for resiliency. I imagine there are a few million Texans ready to chip in right now. And maybe we can even reconsider links east and west to facilitate sharing more power when it gets really, really hot or really, really cold. Texans shouldn’t have to start shopping for generators to prepare for the next hot summer or winter storm.
Unanticipated events and consequences are going to be much more common in the years to come. It would be nice if we could expect our political leaders wto take the necessary steps to deal with this. I’m not holding my breath, certainly not with the Republican leadership in Texas.