Once again, Texans are suffering because of a failure of disaster planning and investment to prepare for the worst.
First, it was the pandemic. Texas public health infrastructure has been shown for a year to be lacking, at both local and state levels. Leaders tried to craft a plan in 2015 to prepare for the inevitable, but it was stopped over political issues.
This time, its an unprecedented but, importantly, not unpredictable stretch of cold weather and storms blanketing the entire state. Public and private sector leaders may try to say theres no way they could have been prepared for this. Thats a line of bull that no Texan should accept.
After 2011s epic winter storm known around here as the one that ruined the Super Bowl in Arlington agencies at all levels offered recommendations to address the very problems that contributed to this outage, too.
There must be accountability. People must be fired. Companies must be fined and required to do better. Winterization of power plants must be a priority.
The immediate focus, of course, is on getting power back up as quickly as possible. Were in for days more of this, and lives are at stake. If more electricity cant be generated, blackouts must be rotated to offer relief to Texans whove been without power for a day or more.
Power companies and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, as every Texan now knows, have compounded the problem with miserably poor communication and broken promises. The promise of rotating outages flopped, and no one can explain why in plain English.
Once the crisis is over, laws must change. A thorough investigation of both the public and private actors is necessary. Gov. Greg Abbotts declaration that ERCOT reform is an emergency priority for the Legislature is a start, but only that. Generators must be required to do a better job of winter preparation, even if the state or consumers must ultimately help pay the bill.
The failures here are spectacular and obvious. In November, ERCOT proudly announced that the state had sufficient energy supply for the winter. The excuse will likely be that no one could have predicted this storm. But its been evident for more than a week that a brutal cold was coming, and ERCOT officials were saying as late as Thursday that the system was ready. How can they have been so stupefyingly wrong?
But these cold snaps are not that rare. After the 2011 debacle, a thorough federal review found that parts of the Southwest have suffered these events at least every five years.
Texas is an energy giant. This shouldnt happen here. We have a large and diverse energy supply. The culprit here is a clear failure of preparation, period.
The blame game is already falling into predictable narratives. On the right, the problem is too much reliance on renewable energy. On the left, its privatization, Republican leadership and a failure to anticipate the effects of climate change. Theres some truth in most of it, but the focus needs to be on specific actions that were not taken, whos responsible for them and how to prevent them from happening again. Solve specific problems rather than railing at huge ones.
It seems apparent that power generators havent done enough to winterize their plants, so shutdowns and failures kicked in just when the power was needed most. That extends to renewables, too, as wind turbines froze over. Natural gas transmission has been a problem as well.
These are big, but fixable, problems. The Legislature must dig in to identify the specifics and then act accordingly. A law enacted in 2011 gave the Public Utility Commission power to require generators to report on their abnormal weather preparations and file an emergency plan. Has that been done, and if preparations were inadequate, why didnt anyone step in? Perhaps regulators need more enforcement teeth. Thats always a tough sell in Texas, but its clear these companies need a nudge, and perhaps help paying the bills.
Itll be all too easy to forget this dreadful week when spring arrives. But its not just the occasional winter storm. Every summer, our power supply and grid are stressed by the extensive heat. We havent seen this level of failure yet during a summer, but its coming.
When it does, Texans must be able to look back and see that everything possible was done to prepare. Lives depend on it.
The precipitating cause of the rolling blackouts experienced in Texas and Arizona during the February 2011 cold weather event was the large number of electric generator outages. The principal cause of the gas service curtailments experienced in several southwestern states was the production declines in the supply of natural gas, which led to volume and pressure reductions in the pipelines. The task force has analyzed in detail the causes of these outages and declines, and found that the majority of them were directly or indirectly related to the weather, particularly so with respect to production declines in the gas supply.
This section of the report describes in detail those causes, both weather and non-weather-related. While the storm itself was an uncontrollable event of force majeure, the question arises as to whether the facilities affected should have been better prepared to withstand the severe weather. Was the cold spell so unprecedented that the entities responsible for those facilities could not reasonably be expected to have taken preventative actions? Or did entities fail to take into account lessons that could have been learned from past cold weather events in the Southwest?
These questions are addressed in the next section of this report, entitled Prior Cold Weather Events.
A. Electric
The rolling blackouts that utilities implemented during the cold weather event, which centered in Texas (ERCOT, EPE) and Arizona (SRP), were almost entirely the result of trips, derates, and failures to start of the generating units in those regions. The localized blackouts experienced by PNM in New Mexico, however, were caused by transmission trips. Units in Oklahoma and Kansas also experienced generator outages, but these did not result in blackouts.
The task force has analyzed these various generator outages to determine their underlying causes. By far, the most common cause of the outages was the cold weather, most commonly when sensing lines froze and caused automatic or manual unit trips. There were also several outages that were due to operator error or non-weather-related equipment failures. In a lesser number of cases, an interruption in the supply of natural gas prevented gas-fired units from providing power.