Almost 5 million customers in Texas were without power Monday as a fierce winter storm pummeled the state and temperatures in Dallas plunged to the low single digits. Tucker Carlson invited former energy secretary Rick Perry to explain the Texas grid failure. The Fox News host suddenly believes the government should be in charge of the power grid (Raw Story, emphasis mine):
“I love Texas, I don’t want to attack Texas,” Tucker Carlson said.
“On the other hand, the most basic responsibility of government, you’d think, is to keep the power on, especially as people need it to survive,” Carlson said. “They didn’t. Why?”
But at that exact moment, Perry lost his internet connection.
Carlson was not really interested in seeing the government run the power grid. He was more interested in blaming government interference for the grid failure in Texas. Same thing?
Perry’s power had gone out. After he kicked on his generator, Perry returned to complain about the Green New Deal and that there is not enough diversity in the power supply because so much coal and nuclear power capacity has gone permanently offline. Reliance on alternatives alone, he said, is “reckless” and “not scientific.”
Half of the wind-generating capacity in west Texas is offline because many windmills have frozen up in the low temperatures, reports the Austin-American Statesman. Carlson used that detail to blame windmills as “silly fashion accessories” and “malleable, weak” politicians for relying on green energy in a state rich in fossil-based energy resources.
“We don’t know exactly why”
And of course, Carlson gets it wrong (Ars Technica):
Texas is unusual in that almost the entire state is part of a single grid that lacks extensive integration with those of the surrounding states. That grid is run by an organization called ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, a nonprofit controlled by the state legislature.
According to a statement released today by ERCOT, the grid entered a state of emergency shortly after 1am on Monday, meaning it could no longer guarantee enough power generation to meet customer demands. This is because roughly 30 gigawatts of generation capacity has been forced offline.
Wind produces only a small fraction of the state’s energy. Windmills produce less energy in the winter, and in fact are still producing more there than forecast for February. Texas nuclear plants, coal plants and thermal energy generators also went offline in the cold.
“We don’t know exactly why they tripped offline yet,” said Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations. “We’re certainly going to be doing an event analysis. We’ll certainly go through and figure out why those things have happened.”
Ars Technica again:
So while having Texas’ full wind-generating capacity online would help, the problems with meeting demand appear to lie elsewhere. An ERCOT director told Bloomberg that problems were widespread across generating sources, including coal, natural gas, and even nuclear plants. In the past, severe cold has caused US supplies of natural gas to be constrained, as use in residential heating competes with its use in generating electricity. But that doesn’t explain the shortfalls in coal and nuclear, and the ERCOT executive wasn’t willing to speculate.
With generation failing to meet demand, ERCOT was left with no other option other than to cut off customers’ access to power. “About 10,500 MW of customer load was shed at the highest point,” as the company put it. In a graph posted on ERCOT’s homepage, you can watch a sudden plunge in demand occurring at the time the emergency started, indicating that many customers likely saw their electricity cut off at this point. And at two points in the day since, demand experienced an additional plunge when it threatened to exceed supply, indicating further cuts.
The costs of “freedom”
The Texas Tribune posted a 2011 explainer on why energy-rich Texas hasn’t enough power this morning. Because Texas insists on freedom from federal regulation, Texas stands alone, largely separated from the Eastern and Western Interconnections. Meaning those power networks have limited ability to send Texas power in emergencies.
To make things worse, isolation makes Texas its own under-regulated power market. Spot prices for power jumped 10,000% on Monday. Reuters reports, “Real-time wholesale market prices on the power grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) were more than $9,000 per megawatt hour late Monday morning, compared with pre-storm prices of less than $50 per megawatt hour, according to ERCOT data.”
If there is any failure in the Lone Star State, Texas and its private producers own it, not Green New Deal promoter Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Maybe it’s the10,000% price jump that has Carlson flirting with socializing power delivery.*
* American Public Power Association: In terms of total generation produced by public power utilities, according to the most recent data (2019) from the EIA, public power entities produced 109.2 million MWh of electricity from coal, 120.5 million MWh from natural gas, 78.6 million MWh from hydro, 62.3 million MWh from nuclear, and 8.9 million MWh from non-hydro renewables. This data can be seen in percentages in the chart on the next page (Figure 2). It is important to note, however, that public power supplies approximately 15 percent of electricity to end-users in the United States, but it only produces approximately 10 percent of the MWh generated. So, end-use public power utilities as a whole are net purchasers of power from other sources (i.e., investor-owned utilities, independent power producers, joint action agencies, rural electric cooperatives, federal power marketing administrations, and the Tennessee Valley Authority).