On Sunday, Victor De Caires, a recent Stevens graduate, got the first sign that something was wrong around 11 p.m. Outside, the temperature in his hometown of Richmond, Texas, had reached record lows amid Winter Storm Uri. He was sheltered indoors when the low hum of the heater stopped and the lights flickered overhead. A few seconds of dark quiet before he could see again and the noise resumed. But only for a few hours. As he lay asleep that night, De Caires and millions of others were sealed in darkness, without power, as the inside temperatures slowly reached equilibrium with the deep freeze outdoors.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the operator of the Texas grid, had turned off power to large portions of the state to deal with power shortages caused by the cold weather. Gas pipes and wind turbines froze, coal plants went offline, and even a nuclear reactor, usually resilient to weather events, tripped.
Elsewhere in the United States, when experiencing a power shortage, grid operators can buy gas and electricity from neighboring states. But Texas has kept its electric grid separate from the other two large grids in the lower United States, save a few relatively small connection points. That means ERCOT was left to face the power shortages with just its own resources. It invoked the final option for dealing with an energy crisis, reserved for the direst circumstances: it cut power to residents and businesses.
This goes by a few names—load shedding, rolling blackouts—but it means the same thing: customers are intentionally cut off from electricity to reduce the overall demand. The grid is an extraordinarily finicky machine, and if the demand for electricity exceeds what is available, it can destroy vital equipment, leading to much longer and more severe blackouts. According to ERCOT officials, this was “seconds and minutes” away from happening. The rolling blackouts, which meant to last a maximum of 45 minutes at a time, were in some cases extended to 48 hours or more.
Some criticized the poor performance of wind turbines for the outages. Texans have over $50 billion on wind power, yet on Monday, wind turbines at times failed to meet even conservative expectations for their output. Critics of Texas’ wind investments were quick to point out that some wind turbines had stopped working because they froze.
Others have fought back against this view, arguing that the outages were caused by failures across the board, notably the loss of over 30 GW of generating capacity from natural gas, coal, and a single nuclear reactor. Natural gas plants and gas delivery failed at higher rates than wind turbines did, and therefore wind power was not to blame.
Both arguments have it partially right. In terms of energy sources that were counted on to deliver power during the crisis, natural gas was a bigger letdown. Yet it is a problem in itself that wind was expected to make relatively little power during that time. To people freezing in their homes, what matters is having electricity. There were no saints here.
Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, wrote on Twitter that the grid failure was caused less by inherent characteristics of wind or gas than by underpreparation for avoidable cold-weather accidents.
The incident has raised questions about the structure of energy markets and planning. In contrast to most regions of the United States, Texas chooses not to pay for much backup electricity, or reserve margins, by forgoing “capacity auctions.” At capacity auctions, electricity producers sell what are essentially promises to generate electricity in the future. Without these auctions, Texas gets most of its electricity in real-time or day-ahead markets. Without having paid in advance for needed backup power, the unexpected plummet in supply sent Texas’ electricity prices to the Moon, at one point reaching over $9000 per megawatt. For reference, the previous day had seen prices of $30 per megawatt.
De Caires spent the day without electricity. He and his family wore their coats around the house. His father used ice and snow from outside to keep the fridge and freezer cold. They charged their phones with their car battery. Late Monday night,the hum of their heater began to warm the air, and they could again see without flashlights. As I spoke with De Caires on Tuesday evening, he reflected that he felt lucky. Some of his friends had gone to stay with others, their outages going on two days and counting. Countless others have been less fortunate still, the outages and cold temperatures adding to already difficult circumstances. As he mentioned this, the call went silent, then dropped. “Lost power again,” he texted a few minutes later.
The impacts of the blackouts are yet to be fully seen. Millions are under a boil water notice because of ruptured water pipes, a threat without remedy as electric stoves remain useless. Hospitals saw an influx of patients with carbon monoxide poisoning from trying to heat their homes with gas stoves, grills, or generators. One Houston doctor called it “a situation that could overwhelm an emergency department.” The economic effects, too, are expected to be vast.
Going on Friday, power outages continue throughout Texas. And though the Lone Star State has dominated the news, states across the country, from Oregon to Virginia, have suffered from vast power outages related to the cold.
Around the world, nearly a billion people have no access to electricity, and billions more have unreliable access. It is not often in the United States that we are forced to understand what that is like, even for a day. As we seek to avoid a repeat of this week’s energy crisis, we would do well to turn some of our attention to the debilitating and ongoing energy crisis that parts of the world weather nonstop.
(Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Victor De Caires lived in Rockville, TX instead of Richmond, TX, and that the first outage occurred on Monday night instead of Sunday.)
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