If You're Feeling Down, Just Look at Texas, and You'll Feel Better

FOX News is banging the drum against wind power in Texas, blaming it for all their power woes, but wind power is coming in like a champ. It’s natural gas and coal that are failing:

The reason people in Texas are currently experiencing the collapse of a badly overloaded system, leading to extended outages lasting for hours, is simply because that’s the way the system is designed to work. The incentive in Texas is to provide for exactly as much power as is needed, and not one hamster-wheel-driven watt more. Because in a system that never reached 100% of capacity, power would always be cheap. It’s fighting over the difference between 99.9% demand and 100.1% demand that drives the system and generates profits.

So how did wind come into it? That’s also because of profits. Texas doesn’t have over 10,700 wind turbines generating power for its grid because rural Texans decided they liked the look, or because there was a sudden inspiration to “go green.” Texas has wind power because wind power is so insanely cheap. It’s so cheap that producing power from wind turbines is less than the cost of operating a coal-fired power plant. That’s not the cost of building the plant. Someone could build coal plants for free, hand them over to the utilities, and just running them would still cost more than going out and buying the wind turbines to replace them.

Texas has wind power, because in a market highly incentivized to find the cheapest solution, wind power came out on top. With the rapidly falling prices, solar is also starting to form a bigger part of the picture in Texas, but for the moment the other big player in that state is the same as it is in most states—natural gas.

The introduction of fracking led to a burst (pun intended) of gas on the market. Previously, more limited supplies of natural gas, and the speed with which producing fields played out, created a price for gas that swing through long oscillations, falling far below, then rising above, the price of its main competitor at the time, coal. But with fracking, gas was suddenly abundant and cheap. Building natural gas power plants is also relatively cheap. Unlike coal plants, which for a number of reasons work best when absolutely enormous (and carrying a price tag that’s, at least, several hundred million), natural gas power can start small and grow. The incremental nature of gas power, and the high efficiency of combined cycle production, saw gas displace coal across the nation with a rapidity that shocked most energy experts—and bankrupted coal producers.

What Texas has now is a system that’s composed of gas, wind, a lingering set of older coal plants, and a modest amount of nuclear. All of it just enough to provide power when Texas hits those hot summer days when every AC in Dallas goes to “high cool.”

So, what went wrong on Monday? It wasn’t “frozen turbines,” no matter what Fox News says. Again, wind is more than keeping up with its share of the projected load. Yes, there are certainly some turbines out—but with over 10,000 of the things, there are always some out. This also doesn’t seem like a great day to climb a 300’ tower to work on something in a high wind because … brrrr. But that’s not the issue.

Part of the issue comes down to that other item at the top of Texas’ power mix—natural gas. In cold weather, natural gas is in demand because it can be used directly for home heating. That’s driving up not just the price of gas, but also limiting its availability. That’s because the system of pipelines that carry the gas around is also built to match a certain level of demand. Pipelines are expensive. Companies don’t build them “just in case.” High prices and limited availability mean that Texas gas plants are underperforming.

It appears that coal plants are doing the same. It’s not clear exactly why that would be. (Though, as someone who spent 30+ years in the industry, I have some suspicions, starting with this: Did Texas utilities pay the extra fee that coal companies want to treat the coal with antifreeze so that it comes out of train cars more readily in extreme weather? I think not.)

Fossil fuels and nuclear!:

“The performance of wind and solar is way down the list among the smaller factors in the disaster that we’re facing,” Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University, said in an interview. Blaming renewables for the blackouts “is really a red herring.”

Karma is a bitch:

But it's this tweet from Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz, still under fire for his role in the January 6 insurrection, that has many mocking him. Last summer, California suffered from rolling blackouts that were the result of "an extreme heat wave caused by climate change. 

Rather than express sympathy, or say nothing at all, Cruz served up a mean-spirited attack on California for being "unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity."

ERCOT appears to be a comfy place. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss (in Toronto):

On Tuesday, the Austin American-Statesman reported that one-third of the leaders of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the governing body that oversees Texas' independent power grid, do not actually live in Texas — including the chair and vice chair.

"Sally Talberg, chairwoman of ERCOT's board of directors, is a former state utility regulator who lives in Michigan, according to her biography on ERCOT's website," reported Madlin Mekelburg. "Vice Chairman Peter Cramton is a professor of economics at the University of Cologne in Germany and at the University of Maryland. His Linkedin profile lists his location as Del Mar, Calif." 

Three other members of the 15-seat board also live out of state and off the grid they are operating: "Vanessa Anesetti-Parra, a board member, serves as vice president of regulatory and compliance at Just Energy and lists her location on Linkedin as Toronto. Board member Terry Bulger spent his career as a banking professional in the United States, Canada and in Europe. His biography on the ERCOT website states that he is a resident of Wheaton, IL, a Chicago suburb. Raymond Hepper, another board member, retired in 2018 from ISO New England, which operates the electric system and wholesale markets for the six states that make up the area. His Linkedin profile lists his residency as Auburn, Maine."