Texas didn’t plan for its electricity grid to fail, and frankly, we shouldn’t have to

This comment is part of a series published by The Dallas Morning News Opinion to explore ideas and guidelines for strengthening electrical reliability. The full series can be found here: Keeping the Lights On.

After the winter storm of February 2021 left millions of Texans in the dark for days, resulted in hundreds of deaths, and hooked customers for tens of billions of dollars, it would be hard to find someone to say all of this is good. The cascading failures in our various energy (electricity and natural gas) and water systems have reminded us that while our system is robust (it did not fail), it has its limits.

There is a way forward, but it requires that we accept that we need to change with the world and plan better.

I was part of a team at the University of Texas at Austin that was able to dig deeper into some of the data from the event, and we recently released a report on our findings. Among other things, we found that many power plants suffered weather-related failures above the specified minimum nominal temperatures, the costs for the week could have been even higher and some critical machine parts that were in the natural gas supply chain were voluntarily signed until the electricity was switched off.

While we have not made any political proposals in this report, we have tried to provide a set of facts to policy-makers in working out a response to the event.

When half of the fleet of power plants on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid either froze, lost fuel, or had a mechanical problem at the same time, there really was no other option but to turn off electricity for millions. No crisis response is ever perfect, and we probably could have made better use of some of our existing tools (requesting additional demand responses, keeping circuits online with distributed backup generation, etc.), but how big would the difference be? have made is unclear. Frankly, we don’t intend to fail that badly, and frankly we shouldn’t have to.

No system is designed to work reliably with so many errors. If half of an airline’s planes broke down in one day, there would be chaos at the airports, or if half of the internet went offline, much of our daily work would come to a standstill.

A general refrain is that Texas needs better planning, which is fair. Optionally, there is no central planner in our system. In our system, better planning only happens to the extent that better market incentives, standards, rules and regulations are created so that the market becomes a better place. Our market can still function, but it needs the right incentives to function the way we want and expect. Markets can still thrive with appropriate restraints. For example, hundreds of makes and models of cars are sold in the United States, but they must all meet the same minimum safety standards.

The heart of good planning is knowing what you are planning. We have traditionally looked at historical weather patterns to estimate future ones, but changing climates make this more difficult. Add to this our resistance to even talking about climate change in Texas, so much so that the state’s own climatologist doesn’t always use the word “change” when speaking to state officials about climate. This resistance makes it harder to make sure the lights stay on next time.

Texas has been an energy state since the state’s first commercial oil well was drilled in Nacogdoches County over 150 years ago. We are not only leading in the types of energy that have contributed to climate change, but also in the renewable energies of the future, which companies want to support our rural economy, cut costs and save water at the same time.

But if we want to be ready for the future, we have to put our house in order first.

The first step we need to take is to fully define what we are ready to plan. In essence, how bad are we going to ride a storm? In a state as large as ours, opinions will be different and there will be no one-size-fits-all solution.

Once that is clear, we can develop regulations on minimum standards that power plants and natural gas equipment must meet, such as the range of outside temperatures in which the equipment must operate or requirements for on-site fuel storage. And we can develop market incentives, such as fair prices in times of scarcity.

Next, we find all of the demand, from residential consumers to industrial refineries, willing to be flexible, especially in times of scarcity, and we can create programs for them to reduce usage against incentives. At least insofar as it does not destabilize other parts of the system.

Finally, we need to take into account external factors that the electricity sector needs to function. The power grid does not work in a vacuum. Renewables are weather dependent and their performance can sometimes be poor. Natural gas power plants are dependent on the natural gas supply, which is regulated outside the electricity sector and (in contrast to the electricity market) has no upper price limit. About half of the power plants in ERCOT burn natural gas, which is usually reliable but couldn’t keep up with demand during the winter storm when we needed it most. Some suppliers may have had an economic incentive to fail.

How we hold our own against the next storm depends on whether we are ready to respond holistically to the last one.

Joshua D. Rhodes is a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He wrote this column for the Dallas Morning News.

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