ARGUMENT: Power outagesLessons from the Texas Grid Disaster: Planning and Investing for a Different Future

Published 22 February 2021

It is now a week out from the start of the massive Texas grid failure. Alexandra Klass writes that at this point we already know that freezing wind turbines – in fact, wind turbines outperformed grid operator expectations, despite the extreme cold, and the outages would have been worse without the wind energy that remained online. the state’s electric grid failed for a very simple reason—because Texas power plant operators do not insulate their facilities for sustained cold temperatures. As a result, pipes and equipment needed to run the state’s natural gas plants, nuclear plants, and wind turbines froze.

It is now a week out from the start of the massive Texas grid failure that has resulted in numerous deaths; millions of people plunged into darkness; scores of communities without clean water or heat in record cold temperatures; and billions of dollars in catastrophic damage to homes, businesses and the physical infrastructure that supports them. Critical questions surround the causes of this massive disaster and how to plan for the future so that a tragedy of this scale does not happen again.

Alexandra Klass writes in Lawfare that

At this point, there are many facts that Americans already know. Contrary to the spurious claims by Governor Greg Abbott as well as numerous right-wing politicians and pundits, freezing wind turbines and the state’s history of supporting renewable energy development did not cause the grid to fail. Indeed, wind turbines outperformed grid operator expectations, despite the extreme cold, and the outages would have been worse without the wind energy that remained online. Instead, the state’s electric grid failed for a very simple reason—because Texas power plant operators do not insulate their facilities for sustained cold temperatures. As a result, pipes and equipment needed to run the state’s natural gas plants, nuclear plants, and wind turbines froze, taking a large fraction of them offline at precisely the moment that energy demand statewide skyrocketed in an attempt to heat homes and businesses. When all was said and done, wind energy performed fairly well overall and natural gas, which provides the vast majority of the state’s electricity in the winter months, failed spectacularly. While there are ongoing, important debates over the need to invest in more renewable energy in Texas and nationwide, the problems in Texas this week were not the state’s current mix of energy resources, but the fact that the state’s energy resources were not prepared to perform in the low temperatures the entire state saw this week.