This article in The Texas Monthly is long but a most interesting read. I'll only quote a few highlights.
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| Texas blacked out. (Its grid is cut off from the rest of the USA.) |
Nobody yet knew just how widespread the blackouts would become—that they would spread across almost the entire state, leave an unprecedented 11 million Texans freezing in the dark for as long as three days, and result in as many as seven hundred deaths. But neither could the governor, legislators, and regulators who are supposed to oversee the state’s electric grid claim to be surprised. They had been warned repeatedly, by experts and by previous calamities—including a major blackout in 2011—that the grid was uniquely vulnerable to cold weather.
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Unlike most other states that safely endured the February 2021 storm, Texas had stubbornly declined to require winterization of its power plants and, just as critically, its natural gas facilities. In large part, that’s because the state’s politicians and the regulators they appoint are often captive to the oil and gas industry, which lavishes them with millions of dollars a year in campaign contributions. During the February freeze, the gas industry failed to deliver critically needed fuel, and while Texans of all stripes suffered, the gas industry scored windfall profits of about $11 billion—creating debts that residents and businesses will pay for at least the next decade.
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But the situation was only growing more dire. At the precise time of the third call, the frequency reached a critical threshold: 59.4 hertz. The Texas grid, which has been around in some form since World War II, had only once in its history fallen this low. Automated turbines across the state began spinning even faster to produce more electricity, but when the frequency dips below 59.4 hertz, the turbines reach speeds and pressures that can cause catastrophic damage to them, requiring that they be repaired or replaced. This scenario was unlikely because, to prevent it, the grid automatically triggers a nine-minute countdown when it strikes 59.4 hertz. If the frequency did not rise in time, power plants would shut down and the grid would begin turning itself off completely. This would leave all 26 million Texans who relied on the ERCOT grid without power for weeks or months.
A few more minutes ticked by. The frequency kept falling, touching 59.302 hertz, yet another alarming precipice. At 59.3 hertz, human operators are taken out of the equation: they are too slow to make the urgent adjustments that are needed to stabilize the grid. The system is programmed to automatically start blacking out as many areas as are necessary to balance power supply and demand. But in this scenario, that fail-safe may not have worked because so many areas had already been manually cut off. “We were on the very edge,” said Easton.
In a last-ditch effort to prevent the grid’s collapse, ERCOT placed a fourth hotline call, at 1:55 a.m., and ordered another 3,500 megawatts. All across Texas, grid operators were moving as quickly as they could, blacking out more and more neighborhoods, but they were running out of options. As the countdown approached zero, the frequency suddenly shot back up. The immediate crisis was over—the last-second load shed had worked—but for most of the following day, the grid remained dangerously unstable.
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It is hard to fathom the devastation a total shutdown would have wreaked. Bill Magness, then the CEO of ERCOT, would explain as much to the Texas Senate ten days later. Magness is a lawyer with a buzz cut and ramrod-straight posture who spent time in the nineties and aughts as a practicing Buddhist. “What my team and the folks at the utilities in Texas would be doing is an exercise called ‘black start,’ ” he said. A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. It’s not a matter of flipping switches. The steps required for a black start are numerous, complex, and delicate. No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least.
Most of the state’s residents would have been without heat, potable water, or light, as would almost all of the businesses on which they depend. Traffic lights wouldn’t have worked. Caravans of trucks, likely escorted by the National Guard, would have delivered fuel to generators to keep hospitals (many of which were nearly at max capacity because of COVID-19), fire departments, and other emergency services operating. When the freeze lifted and the roads thawed, many would have attempted an exodus into neighboring states—all of which, with a few brief exceptions, kept power—but even that would have proved difficult because gas pumps run on electricity. Magness looked grimly around the Senate chamber as he described the doomsday scenario. “Imagine: the suffering that we saw [would have been] compounded.”
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Of the millions of Texans who lost electricity during the blackouts, which lasted from Monday through Thursday, most experienced it as a week of compounding problems. Millions either lost water or needed to boil water. When the water finally came back on, burst pipes began to flow, causing billions of dollars in damage. Plumbers were so overwhelmed with calls that some homeowners had to wait months for repairs. Economists at the Dallas Federal Reserve estimated that the blackouts cost the state’s economy somewhere in the $80 to $130 billion range, potentially making it the most expensive disaster in state history.
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Of course, that didn’t stop politicians from pointing fingers. Rick Perry, former governor and former U.S. secretary of energy, tried to preempt calls to increase federal oversight of the state’s grid. In a striking display of insensitivity to the families who were grieving the loss of loved ones, he claimed that Texans were willing to forgo power “for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was one of many politicians to blame wind turbines. “Our renewables aren’t reliable,” he said on Good Morning America. Governor Greg Abbott appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and argued that the blackouts showed how the Green New Deal, which was then a subject of intense debate in Washington, D.C., would be a “deadly deal for the United States.”
Blaming renewables was, of course, a politically convenient lie. Yes, some wind farms in West and South Texas had frozen up—their operators hadn’t invested in blades with internal warming coils that allow windmills to function perfectly fine in other states and regions, including north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. But many windmills kept working, helping to prevent a worse disaster. Even Abbott admitted, while the blackouts were ongoing, that the biggest culprit was power plants that ran on gas.
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A separate body, the Railroad Commission of Texas, regulates the state’s oil and gas industry—or at least it’s supposed to. In practice, it seldom does. Its three commissioners are elected, and their campaign coffers are filled by oil and gas industry executives. Following the 2021 blackout, the commissioners expressed little interest in learning why the February storm caused statewide outages only in Texas, not in neighboring states and states far to the north. They instead aggressively defended the industry they’re supposed to regulate, arguing publicly that the state’s failure to require winterization of natural gas providers played no role in the disaster. At the February committee hearing, Christi Craddick, then the Railroad Commission chair, tried to pin the blame on electric power producers, claiming that the gas industry was hamstrung by lack of electricity, not the other way around. “The oil field simply cannot run without power,” she testified.
That claim, however, doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Craddick was well aware of problems with the gas supply before the blackouts began, something I discovered while reviewing records of dozens of phone calls, emails, and texts among those responsible for keeping the lights on. Five days before the blackouts began, Walker, the PUC chair, received an unwelcome call from an executive at Vistra, an Irving-based company that is the largest power producer in ERCOT. The executive warned that the company would be unable to meet the rising demand for electricity because it would soon face natural gas shortfalls at several of its plants. Texas normally produces about 29 billion cubic feet of gas a day. By February 11, when temperatures hit 22 degrees in Midland, about 915 million cubic feet were already offline, according to a federal report on the blackout. (Six days later, around the peak of the blackouts, 3.7 billion cubic feet were offline. All but 591 million of that was caused by the failure of gas infrastructure.) On February 13, two days before the blackouts began, 22 gas processing plants had been disrupted by cold weather conditions. Not a single one was disrupted by loss of electric power.
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The week of the blackout produced staggering, hard-to-fathom energy bills Texans will be paying for years. That’s because the state’s electricity market broke sometime around midday on Monday, February 15. In the hours after the blackouts, ERCOT tried to shore up electricity reserves to stabilize the grid. The computer system that runs the market, though, interpreted this as an oversupply (in the middle of blackouts!) and dropped prices. When ERCOT and the PUC realized what was happening, officials decided to bypass the market and, on Monday evening, manually set prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour. (By comparison, the average hourly price in 2020 was $25.73.) For fear that restarting the market and letting prices fluctuate in the midst of blackouts would lead to instability, officials kept prices at that artificially inflated level until Friday.
As a result, Texans spent an exorbitant amount on electricity during a week in which most of them couldn’t get much electricity. For the entirety of 2020, Texans paid $9.8 billion to keep the juice flowing. On February 16 alone, they spent roughly $10.3 billion. Costs for the month of February totaled more than $50 billion.
You might think that the natural gas industry, having scored a multibillion-dollar windfall at the expense of other Texans, might show some magnanimity in victory and agree to take steps to ensure against future blackouts. But you would be wrong. The gas industry continues to fight ferociously to avoid the kinds of regulations that are commonplace in other states. It has boosted by millions of dollars its campaign contributions to friendly politicians, including the three officials leading the Railroad Commission.
So what would it cost to winterize all the wells in Texas, as most other states do, and ensure the electricity flows the next time an Arctic blast hits the Lone Star State? Dallas Federal Reserve economists cite a 2011 estimate that it would cost each gas power plant $50,000 to $500,000 to winterize. Statewide, it would cost between $85 and $200 million annually—the rough equivalent of one or two days of revenue from the Texas gas industry, and less than one-fiftieth the cost that the industry charged during the February disaster.
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