Name: Texas grid fails to weatherize, repeats mistake feds cited 10 years ago
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Texas grid fails to weatherize, repeats mistake feds cited 10 years ago

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WASHINGTON - Ten years ago, plunging temperatures forced rolling blackouts across Texas, leaving more than 3 million people without power as the Super Bowl was played outside Dallas.Now, with a near identical scenario following another Texas cold snap, Texas power regulators are being forced to answer how the unusually cold temperatures forced so much of the state’s power generation offline when Texans were trying to keep warm.To start, experts say, power generators and regulators failed to heed the lessons of 2011 — or for that matter, 1989. In the aftermath of the Super Bowl Sunday blackout a decade ago, federal energy officials warned the grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT, that Texas power plants had failed to adequately weatherize facilities to protect against cold weather.A federal report that summer recommended steps including installing heating elements around pipes and increasing the amount of reserve power available before storms, noting many of those same warnings were issued after similar blackouts 22 years earlier and had gone unheeded.“We need better insulation and weatherization at facilities and in homes,” said Michael Webber, an energy professor at the University of Texas. “There's weaknesses in the system we haven't dealt with.”A spokesman for the Association of Electric Companies of Texas declined to comment on that criticism and said state power plants submit weatherization plans to both the Public Utility Commission, which oversees the power industry, and ERCOT. In a conference call Monday, Dan Woodfin, ERCOT’s senior director of system operations, said generators followed best practices for winterization, but the severity of the weather went “well beyond the design parameters of an extreme Texas winter.”But the repeat of the events of a decade ago is raising questions in Austin as to whether the state has failed to ensure power companies are adequately protecting equipment from the elements. At the peak of the blackout, some 45,000 megawatts of generation capacity were offline, leaving more than 4 million Texans without power.On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott said reform at ERCOT would be an emergency item during the legislative session, calling the agency, “anything but reliable.”The Texas Legislature passed a law in 2011 requiring power companies to file regular reports with the Texas Public Utility Commission about their weatherization efforts. On Tuesday, State Comptroller Glenn Hegar, who authored that bill, questioned whether the measure had gone far enough.“While the issues that are plaguing our electric grid system in this disastrous winter storm are complex,” Hegar said, “I am extremely frustrated that 10 years later our electric grid remains so ill-equipped for these weather events.”On HoustonChronicle.com:The ability of Texas’s power grid to keep up with a growing population's demand for electricity has become an issue in recent years, as generation shortages on hot summer days drove wholesale power prices to soaring levels, maxing out at the state cap of $9,000 per megawatt hour.Even so, power companies complain electricity prices, which average about $25 per megawatt hour over the year, are too low to provide incentives to build new power plants or improve older ones. Some power generators have argued for Texas to shift from a so-called electricity-only market, in which the only incentives to invest in new generation are prices and profits, to one that that pays power companies not just to generate electricity, but also maintain extra capacity that can be called on at times of high demand.Under existing market rules, the incentive for investing in better protection against cold weather is unclear, said Daniel Cohan, an engineering professor at Rice University. "To me our system of electricity is like selling lottery tickets," he said."Ninety-five percent of the year they're selling power for peanuts,” Cohan said. “They're counting on selling power at times like these when power prices spike 300 times their normal rate."The mix of energy producers that power the Texas grid also is coming under scrutiny, as special interest groups affix blame in a politicized environment. On Monday, the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation issued a series of tweets questioning whether the increasing reliance on wind turbines and solar panels contributed to the outages.Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush a Republican tweeted, “If the last few days have proven anything, it’s that we need oil &amp; gas. Relying solely on renewable energy would be catastrophic.”Environmentalists, meanwhile, cited the outages to question the degree to which fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal can be relied on to supply power in times of extreme weather.On HoustonChronicle.com:In truth, virtually all forms of power generation in Texas suffered outages during the cold snap, with early reports showing gas plants sustaining the most failures, Webber said. Early Monday morning, ERCOT issued a news release saying generation “across fuel types” had gone offline, amid reports of wind turbines covered in ice and natural gas wellheads freezing up.“All the fuels and technologies have their weak point and they’re all failing for different reasons right now,” Webber said. “And it’s happening as demand is setting record highs.”The outages are likely to turn into a political test for Abbott, who as governor is responsible for appointing the PUC, which has oversight over ERCOT.In November, ERCOT Manager of Resource Adequacy Pete Warnken assured the Legislature that the agency had studied a range of extreme weather scenarios for the coming winter and had determined, “there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers."But ERCOT only sets best practices for generators, unable to force them to better protect their equipment from the cold. State Rep. Gene Wu described it as,” trusting producers to use profit motive to maintain production.”“(Except this is not selling pizza, people die w/o power),” he wrote on Twitter.FERC announced Tuesday it had launched a joint task force with the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to examine the outages not just in Texas, but across the Midwest and South.RELATED:&nbsp;One of the questions they will ask is what went wrong during this storm compared to other recent cold snaps. In 2017, ERCOT released a 32-page report showing how during a freeze the previous January only about 2,000 megawatts of capacity were lost - compared to 8,000 megawatts in 2011.At the end of the report was a quotation by the astronaut Alan Sheppard, made during his study of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.“You say to yourself, “OK, why did it happen? Why did we make those bad engineering decisions we made in 1986 with Challenger?” I'll tell you. It's the human element. I suggest that there's a complacency there that comes from success.”Staff Writer Jeremy Blackman contributed to this report.james.osborne@chron.comTwitter.com/@osborneja

WASHINGTON - Ten years ago, plunging temperatures forced rolling blackouts across Texas, leaving more than 3 million people without power as the Super Bowl was played outside Dallas.Now, with a near identical scenario following another Texas cold snap, Texas power regulators are being forced to answer how the unusually cold temperatures forced so much of the state’s power generation offline when Texans were trying to keep warm.To start, experts say, power generators and regulators failed to heed the lessons of 2011 — or for that matter, 1989. In the aftermath of the Super Bowl Sunday...

Texas grid fails to weatherize, repeats mistake feds cited 10 years ago

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