Gov. Greg Abbott wants power companies to “winterize.” Texas’ track record won’t make that easy. Retroactively equipping power plants to withstand cold temperatures is likely to be very difficult and costly, energy experts say. Building energy infrastructure to perform in winter conditions is easier — and cheaper. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/20/texas-power-grid-winterize/ Winterize. That’s the directive Gov. Greg Abbott gave to power companies and lawmakers Thursday when he called for a law and funding to better prepare Texas’ essential power infrastructure for the kind of extreme winter weather that created multiple crises this week. Energy experts said that in some cases, retrofitting plants to withstand cold could be extremely difficult and expensive in Texas. Many of those plants already skimped on such upgrades due to the infrequency of prolonged and widespread subfreezing temperatures in the state. That’s despite a 2011 winter storm that also caused power outages. Building new “winterized” infrastructure, though, often adds little to the overall cost of a new project, experts say. “Our planning is based on outdated weather patterns, and if you use outdated weather, you never expect to freeze,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Millions of people across Texas lost power during this week’s storm, and some died in the extreme cold without heat. On Friday, power was restored to most of the state, although about 140,000 customers are still facing localized outages, according to data compiled by PowerOutage.us. Power outages began early Monday, when the amount of power available to the grid that covers most of Texas began to rapidly drop offline. Natural gas plants, utility scale wind turbines, coal and nuclear plants alike began to trip — many lacked the investments necessary to keep them online during low temperatures. That forced the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, to order transmission utilities to start what was supposed to be “rolling” outages for customers. The goal was to prevent the entire grid from being knocked offline, which, officials said could have left Texans without power for weeks if not months. The rolling outages, though, lasted for days for millions of people. On Feb. 16, at least 4.5 million customers in Texas were without power The operator of Texas' power grid is under investigation after a massive winter storm caused millions of residents in the state to lose power for days. Here's where Texans were most impacted during the worst of the outages between 10 and 11 a.m. Feb. 16. There’s no regulatory requirement to prepare power infrastructure for such extremely low temperatures — something Abbott called for on Thursday. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which has some authority to regulate power generators in the U.S., is also developing mandatory standards for “winterizing” energy infrastructure, a spokesperson said. During a Friday press conference, Bill Magness, president and CEO of ERCOT, called Abbott’s emergency legislative item to winterize power plants “a good idea,” and said ERCOT would implement any changes the Legislature directed them to make. “Texas can't afford for this to happen again,” Magness said. “There are a lot of ideas about how to make that different, and we want to participate in the process.” Winterizing costly to play catch-up Jim Krane, an energy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, has an idea on where to begin: “The natural gas transmission system would be my first choice as a place to look,” he said, noting that the majority of the state’s grid in the winter relies on the resource. It’s also the resource that, during this crisis, failed in the “most spectacular fashion” as Webber put it. From the wells where companies produce natural gas, to the systems to deliver it and run it in gas-fired power plants, the system was not built for the low temperatures — but it doesn’t have to be this way. “You can absolutely winterize [the energy sector in Texas],” Webber said. Webber said upgrades to natural gas plants should be flexible — temporarily enclosed in a structure to keep heat in during the winter and removed to keep the plant cool during the summer. He acknowledges it will come at a cost, but, he said, “it means you can operate when times are tough.” Still, it’s going to be difficult to retrofit gas-fired plants in Texas, said Morris Greenberg, senior manager of North America Power Analytics for S&P Global Platts. That’s because the plants are built to maximize profit. “Retrofitting would be a questionable, challenging solution,” Greenberg said. “Most gas plants are built as lean as possible.” Abbott, in his call to upgrade the power sector, did not specifically point to natural gas production as an area that needed to winterize. But preventing frozen wellheads is one area experts say is ripe for reform, since the cost to build a new well with equipement to withstand the cold is relatively low, and the payoff high. The shortage of natural gas supply was a major constraint during the crisis because gas-fired plants didn’t have enough fuel to generate power. Retrofitting existing natural gas wells would be extremely difficult and probably cost prohibitive, according to Parker Fawcett, a natural gas analyst for S&P Global Platts. But Fawcett said starting to build new wells in Texas with winterization technology is reasonable. It would cost around $20,000 to $50,000 more per well, compared to the current cost of $5 to 9 million in Texas, depending on where it’s drilled, Fawcett estimated. Renewable sources The state’s grid also saw wind turbines go offline this week. While ERCOT did not expect to have very much wind energy available during the peak of winter energy demand, experts said that wind turbines, too, could be winterized. Retrofitting the blades of wind turbines with special coatings and heating elements is not a burdensome cost to generators, energy experts said — likely under 10% of the total cost of the turbine. Nevertheless, few operators do it, not just in Texas but generally, said Krane, of Rice’s Baker Institute. That’s because most states and countries rely on wind power as a cheap additional source of energy rather than a primary source. The way most markets are functioning right now, Krane said, “it’s just nice to have when it’s there.” For any upgrade or retrofitting — whether natural gas, wind, coal, or nuclear — winterization is going to be expensive due to the lack of investment the state’s generators and producers of energy have made into preparing for a storm like this in the past, experts said. “It’s like insurance that you’re almost never going to use,” Krane said. Though, that attitude in avoiding cost, he said, is what did end up costing Texans. “After going through this, I think people would be OK with that," he said.
Pure nonsense.... even the operators of the Texas power grid state that wind power was not the cause of the electric grid collapse. Wind Turbines Didn’t Cause Texas Energy Crisis https://www.factcheck.org/2021/02/wind-turbines-didnt-cause-texas-energy-crisis/ A steep decline in energy generated by fossil fuels and nuclear power plants was largely responsible for the power outages in Texas during the deep freeze that recently gripped the state, according to the operators of the state’s power grid. Despite that fact, several high-profile conservative figures — including the state’s governor — have wrongly placed the blame for power outages on wind turbines and have tied the issue to the Green New Deal, legislation Democrats proposed in 2019 with the aim of creating jobs and significantly reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. It didn’t pass in either the House or the Senate, but its tenets are still popular among progressives. President Joe Biden has supported its framework. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Feb. 16, “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. … Our wind and our solar, they got shut down and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power in a statewide basis.” The host of another Fox News show went even further. Tucker Carlson started a segment on his Feb. 15 show, saying, “The Green New Deal has come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas.” Meanwhile, a graphic showing a frozen water feature in the “splash and play kids zone” of a Dallas-area hotel played over his shoulder — it looked vaguely like a windmill. Later, Carlson said, “Green energy inevitably means blackouts. … Green energy means a less reliable power grid. Period. It means failures like the ones we’re seeing now in Texas. … It’s science.” Other public officials echoed these claims — Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Rep. Andy Barr of Kentucky and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia all weighed in on Twitter — and social media posts followed suit, blaming the outage on wind turbines and decrying the Green New Deal. But, as we said, the bulk of the deficit in the energy supply was due to frozen infrastructure for natural gas, not wind. “There is significantly more megawatts in that thermal unit category than in the renewable category,” Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said of the outages at a Feb. 16 press briefing. ERCOT runs the grid that serves most of Texas, and the “thermal unit category” includes natural gas, coal and nuclear power. Indeed, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration — see the adjacent EIA graph — show that in the early morning hours of Feb. 15, natural gas generation dropped 23% by 4 a.m., a total of about 10,000 megawatts on a system that was running about 65,000 megawatts in total at midnight. That morning ERCOT started rolling blackouts. While the Texas energy supply includes a mixture of sources, the largest share comes from natural gas. More than 40% of the state’s energy came from natural gas in 2020, according to a recent ERCOT report. The second largest share is wind, at 23%, then coal, at 18%. So, it’s true that wind plays a significant role in Texas’ power supply — the state actually generates more wind energy than any other state in the nation — but there’s no indication that wind energy was the primary cause of the power outages in Texas. Data showing the amount of energy coming from each source over the course of a year indicate an inverse relationship between wind and natural gas — when one is up, often, the other is down. (See the adjacent EIA graph that shows electricity generation by sources over the last year.) This happened on Feb. 8, just before the cold weather swept in — wind energy dipped and natural gas picked up. That trend generally continued, with natural gas increasing as temperatures across the state reached below freezing. Most households in Texas — 61% of them — have electric heat, compared with 40% nationally. So, the frigid weather caused both a surge in demand for electricity and a decrease in supply of energy as infrastructure froze. Frozen instruments at natural gas, coal and nuclear facilities, plus limited supplies of natural gas and problems with natural gas pressure, led to the outages, Woodfin reportedly explained earlier in the week. “We’ve had some issues with pretty much every kind of generating capacity in the course of this multi-day event,” he said. Beyond those immediate problems, three components of the Texas energy system contributed to the current situation, Julie Cohn, a research historian focused on energy infrastructures at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in a phone interview. First, Texas has an isolated network. The grid ERCOT manages, which handles about 90% of the state’s power supply, is the only statewide, standalone grid in the continental U.S. Other states are served by either the Eastern or Western interconnections. So, if Texas needs additional power, it can’t import from another system — except in some areas, such as El Paso and part of East Texas. Second, the wholesale power market in Texas incentivizes investors to build power plants that sell electricity on the grid, but it doesn’t incentivize the development of back-up plants that can be tapped in emergency situations like this. Third, while those who run the power system do what they can to plan for as many contingencies as they can, sometimes events arise that are outside their parameters. Cohn cited the 1965 Northeast blackout, one of the biggest power failures in U.S. history, as an example. “I think this weather event is another example of that,” she said. On that front, Princeton University assistant professor and energy systems engineer Jesse Jenkins explained how the weather had affected the Texas power system. “The problems start out in the Permian Basin, where gas wells and gathering lines have frozen, and pumps that are used to lift gas from the ground lack electricity to operate; this has cut gas field production in half,” Jenkins wrote in an op-ed piece for the New York Times. “At least one nuclear reactor near Houston also went offline Monday when a safety sensor froze; it was restarted Tuesday night.” Energy infrastructure can be weatherized, Jenkins wrote, pointing out that other parts of the country see the same temperatures without suffering major power outages. In Iowa, for example, a spokesman for wind farm operator MidAmerican Energy told a local news station on Feb. 17, “We add cold weather packages to our wind turbines to make sure that they can handle what mother nature throws at us here during the wintertime.” Wind energy accounts for 42% of Iowa’s net power generation, as of 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s the highest share for any state. It’s also worth noting that the Iowa Utilities Board reported that the state’s largest power generators, including MidAmerican Energy, had enough electricity to supply their customers through the cold snap, which saw arctic air sweep across the country. Cohn raised a similar point, noting that there’s a wind farm in the North Sea and a recent Bloomberg report explained that turbines in the Arctic Circle can work in temperatures as low as minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit. Most manufacturers now offer turbines that come with ice mitigation systems and heating for some of the equipment, the report said. But that can be costly. There are various approaches to making the Texas system more resilient, Cohn said — for example, investing in connections to other power grids, incentivizing the insulation of homes or winterizing the existing energy systems. As for the suggestion that these problems are in some way related to, or would be worsened by, the Green New Deal — that’s far-fetched. Texas committed itself to investing in renewable energy back in 1999, 20 years before the Green New Deal was introduced. The state set goals for the amount of energy it would use from renewable sources, which include solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave or tidal energy, and biomass or biomass-based waste products including landfill gas. In 2005, the state doubled some of those goals. Still, as we said, the most common source of energy on the Texas grid is natural gas.
Looks like Texas needs to incentivize the insulation of homes AND winterize the existing energy systems. Much less costly than blackouts, collapsing roofs / ceilings, bursting pipes and lost of life. wrbtrader
States and companies berated day and night for night preparing for global warming. Now berated for not preparing for The Big Freeze. Welcome to El Paso.
Igloo Houses are hot items now in Texas...stores in Canada just can not produce enough of them for sale to the Texans. Winter Fails in Texas wrbtrader
Listen to this drunk , and his message from the greatest administration in the history of this country. Larry Kudlow: Texas power outages are 'the consequences' of electing Joe Biden Former White House adviser Larry Kudlow suggested over the weekend that massive power outages in Texas are "the consequences" of electing President Joe Biden, who has only been in office a month. During an interview on Sunday, Kudlow spoke to Fox News host Howard Kurtz about his new Fox Business program. "I think they've moved very rapidly toward the progressive left position on a lot of these issues," Kudlow said of the Biden administration. "He tried to temper it with talk about unity. There was some talk about moving to the center, that there would be more balance, there wouldn't be a far-left progressive agenda." "Unfortunately in the early weeks -- what, we've got a month here -- it has been a left, progressive agenda," he continued. "He's gone after the energy sector. You saw some of the consequences in Texas. That's just the tip of the iceberg." Kudlow did not immediately explain what Biden had done to cause the power outages.
While, we are at it, why are our ET trolls never mentioning the huge fires in California run by their idol Gavin Newsom and the huge number of homes burned as a result of it? All because Newsom had no sense to listen to forest management experts, you know that ones these extreme liberals talk about science and all that stuff? Yet, in the end, they are just dumb sticks.
The governorships of California and New York no longer seem like a viable step from which to seek the Presidency. Nobody competent wants either of those jobs. Those who want the job are unqualified and those who are qualified don't want the job.