With electricity blackouts across Texas, many are wondering: what happened? How does the energy capital of the United States run out of power?

Here’s what happened. THREAD

#1 - Frozen Wind Turbines:

West Texas, where most of the wind energy is focused, had wind turbines that had to be de-iced. The little energy that power regulators planned on wind to supply was now gone.

To make matters worse, existing storage of wind energy in batteries was also gone, because batteries were losing 60% of their energy in the cold.

This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/salgilbertie/2021/02/15/texas-outages-put-reliability-of-renewable-energy-in-the-spotlight/

#2 - Even Nuclear Got Cold: We only have 4 nuclear units in TX, 2 near Houston and 2 near Dallas. At the plant near Houston, one of the two reactors at the plant turned off – due to a precaution because a safety sensor froze.

Even though the system was stable, the reactor shut off because the sensor couldn’t relay that the system was stable. This is just one of the many mechanisms that makes nuclear energy so safe, even though it interfered with our ability to get backup power.

#3 - Low Supply of Natural Gas:

ERCOT planned on 67GW from natural gas/coal, but could only get 43GW of it online. We didn’t run out of natural gas, but we ran out of the ability to get natural gas. Pipelines in Texas don’t use cold insulation – so things were freezing.

We had every natural gas plant—that wasn’t already down for maintenance—online generating power. Gov. Abbott made the right call in diverting all natural gas to home heating fuel and then electricity for homes. Gas and coal brought a stable supply of energy, but still not enough.

Bottom line: Thank God for baseload energy made up of fossil fuels.

Had our grid been more reliant on the wind turbines that froze, the outages would have been much worse.

This raises serious concerns about the reliability of renewable-reliant power grids during extreme weather.

It also raises serious concerns about the push to decommission baseload power sources like natural gas, which are more reliable than wind and are critical right now to keeping the lights on in Texas.

All of this calls into question our ability in Texas to prepare for extreme weather events and plan power accordingly, so we’re not relying on frozen wind turbines to heat our homes during a blizzard.

I’ll be joining my Texas colleagues in getting to the bottom of what happened so it never happens again.

In the meantime, please stay warm, stay safe, and stay strong.