Renewables are not causing blackouts in Texas

Texas and northern Mexico are in the middle of an astonishing cold snap. Conditions are so bad that the bad weather pops out on a national map of traffic conditions:

The cold snap is also prompting blackouts across Texas and northern Mexico. And, of course, that means that politicians in both places are blaming renewables for the failure. In Texas, exhibit A for the prosecution consists of this figure:

Three things happen once the cold snap kicks in. First, wind generation falls up as turbines freeze. Second, natural gas generation spikes up. Finally, coal generation becomes steady as plants fire up to full capacity and stay there to cope with spiking demand. As a result, many observers are concluding that Texas would be just fine if only it hadn’t reoriented its energy mix around windpower.

That would be a correct conclusion if not for the fact that it’s all wrong.

Let’s take it in turn.

First, more coal would not have helped. Coal is lousy in cold weather. Back in 2014 — it seems so long ago, I know — six coal plants consisting of 1.8 megawatts of generation went down in a cold snap. (Here is the ERCOT after-action report for the ’14 cold snap.) The same thing happened during a freeze in February 2011, when ERCOT (the Texan grid operator) had to impose rolling blackouts. In 2014 (and in 2021) natural gas took up the slack, but in 2011 that didn’t work when power cuts hit compression stations.

Second, on paper Texas has more than enough generating capacity right now to handle demand. The state has 75 GW of natural gas capacity alone, to which you can add another 24 GW of coal. The problem is that the capacity is either down for maintenance, in the wrong place, or offline due to the cold, not that it doesn’t exist. In fact, you can see that Texas handled similar levels of demand this summer. The difference is that people expect summer heat waves in Texas. They don’t expect Minnesota-like weather to suddenly roll in from nowhere.

Finally, let’s put points (1) and (2) together and point out that right now the big problem in Texas is due to fossil fuel plants going offline from to the cold. Wells and pipelines are freezing. How much Texas thermal capacity is out, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you:

Thirty gigawatts.

Thirty gigawatts!

Getting the data isn’t easy, but it isn’t that hard either. Go here. Click on “Hourly Resource Outage Capacity.” You will see a long list of zipped CSV files. Open the top one. Look for the column called “TotalResourceMW.” (It’s the first one after the time.) That tells you how much power is out right now. If you read down in the spreadsheet you’ll see how quickly ERCOT expects that power to come on line. (This includes coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear; as a practical matter, no nuclear is off-line in Texas.) “TotalIRRResourcesMW” is the amount of renewable power capacity that is not producing (for any reason) and “TotalNewEquipResourceMW” are resources that are being spun up but have not yet started to inject power into the grid. As of 4pm CST on February 15^th, 2021, 29.7 GW of thermal power is offline.

Now, it isn’t fair to say that all 29.7 GW are down because of the cold. Some power is always offline. I called up February 8^th, before temperatures started to drop. And as of 11am on February 8^th, some 13.1 GW of thermal was offline. Which means, as a first estimate, the cold knocked out about 17 gigawatts of thermal capacity, roughly ten nuclear reactors.

To be frank, I’m surprised it isn’t more. Coal operators in Texas right now are performing miracles. You’ve got to use anti-freeze on the coal supplies to stop them from icing up (particularly lignite coal, which is 35% water) and keep the fan blades on your cooling towers ice-free. You’ve also got to tightly pack your coal piles to keep water from seeping in and be prepared to smash ‘em with bulldozers in case that fails. (The only coal plants I’ve visited up-close-and-personal were in Colombia and they didn’t do any of these things, obviously.) The fact that coal generation is holding steady is quite the feat.

But the fact is that Texas is hitting problems because it ain’t ready for the cold. Renewables aren’t the problem. The state has a total capacity of 25.1 GW of wind and 3.8 GW of utility solar, so right now the ERCOT data that I cited above means that about 6.5 GW of renewables are hitting the grid. That is abovethe 6.1 GW that ERCOT expects in the winter.  

What can be done? Well, the simple answer is better planning. The more complicated one is better incentives. Texas should set up a capacity market that will give natural gas operators financial or contractual reasons to keep their plants on-line during cold weather. Ditto insuring that wind farms are prepared for the cold. A few more nuclear reactors (which would relegate more natural gas to peakload) wouldn’t hurt either, but isn’t going to happen.

Total decarbonization will not be easy until storage becomes extremely cheap. You will either need peak plants or massive battery banks to cope with the Great Blizzard of 2054. And the former will mean somehow maintaining the natural gas infrastructure despite an order-of-magnitude less demand. But these are all solvable problems which would exist even if we went hog-crazy for expensive and polluting coal plants.

TLDR: Texas would be in trouble even if it had never built a wind farm.  So think about that and stop pretending that you don’t care about your unborn grandchildren.

Comments

[Flyby]

Hey!
Do you have a link to source for those nice TEX electricity generation charts?
Thanks!

[CA]

Noel,
Thanks for clearly explaining where the 30GW number comes from, it's being passed around uncited everywhere.

I read that ERCOT suggested requiring winterization on NG distribution and generation infrastructure in 1989 and 2011, but were shot down by industry opposition.

However, it sounds like because NG extraction activities stopped due to weather, only more gas storage could have prevented this because there is simply no gas supply even if the distribution infrastructure and plants had been winterized.

[Noel Maurer]

(1) Flyby: The charts can be generated at the EIA website:

https://www.eia.gov/beta/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/custom/pending/GenerationByEnergySource

Click on ERCOT. Then scroll down to "Electricity generation by energy source." The little tools icon will allow to download data or create charts.

(2) Chase: You're welcome! The actual number is more like 17 GW, because you've got to take into account the fact that some generation would likely be out regardless of the weather. And I think you're also right about the problem being the loss of NG production, although it didn't help that the plants weren't winterized.

The more interesting question is what would have happened if Texas hadn't been an energy island ...