Debacle in Texas Puts ERCOT in the Spotlight
February 2021 will not be remembered fondly in Texas. There is no other way to put it – the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which was formed about 50 years ago, lost control of the state’s power supply during the record-low temperatures that have dogged the state in the last week or so (as of the time of this writing).
As I write this, already 38 people have died from either the cold, vehicle crashes or carbon monoxide poisoning, and 4.5 million homes were impacted by outages. Although the number of outages decreased to about 500,000 four days later, the damage had already been done. Adding to the situation is the fact that the loss of heat caused tons of pipes to burst, ultimately leading to a boil water emergency for millions of residents. A lot went wrong, and it’s a lot to unpack, so let’s get into the details.
How did ERCOT Lose Control?
First, it’s important to understand that ERCOT is unique because it is cutoff from the national grid. It essentially operates a “Texas-only” grid that supplies power to 90% of the state. Because of this isolation, the Texas grid cannot import power from elsewhere to supplement its generation sources. Sure, this isolation allows ERCOT to avoid dealing with federal regulations, but the fact that ERCOT put itself on a proverbial island exasperated an already horrific situation.
Second, Texas is a gas-heavy state. While there was some outage impact from things like frozen wind turbines, it is estimated that roughly 40% of the state’s natural gas production went offline during the event. Unfortunately, it appears that the natural gas infrastructure was not properly winterized. This is critical because, generally speaking, the systems that get gas from the Earth aren’t properly built for cold weather.
Gas power plants typically do not keep much fuel storage on-site; instead, they tend to rely on the constant flow of gas in pipelines. But with the extreme temperatures, operators struggled to bring the gas to the surface so it could be piped – the gathering lines froze, and the wells were too cold to function.
Adding to the problem is that about 4 gigawatts of production capacity was already offline for maintenance purposes prior to the event.
Details are still emerging on this story, and I will be keeping a close eye on it. Sadly, it seems like this could have been avoided (or at least minimized) if ERCOT and the utilities were more proactive with emergency planning and storm hardening efforts. The cold hard truth is that Texas experienced a similar deep freeze situation a decade ago, but the organizations did not implement all of the recommendations that were put forth at that time.
Let’s hope the organizations involved incorporate lessons learned from this failure by upgrading equipment and infrastructure to withstand extreme temperatures, and implementing the other recommendations from 2011 that were not implemented previously.
