Courtesy Don Loucks
Contributing columnist to The Statesman
Part 1 of a 3-part series
The ferocious winter storm Texans experienced last week was historic. The last storm of such magnitude occurred in Texas in 1899. That year, sub-freezing temperatures, snow and ice were experienced all through America’s South. There was great loss of life and property.
The start of the storm on Feb. 14 was very much like in 1899, except that now the affected area is far more populous than it was 122 years ago.
It is easy to start assigning blame for the shortcomings that became evident as the storm cycle took hold. Almost immediately, power was being rationed by “rolling blackouts.” When the power capacity began to drop below the point where power generation plants could maintain line voltage, some had to be taken offline in order to prevent these plants from automatically taking themselves offline. That situation had to be avoided to prevent a complete plant restart cycle which would have meant complete loss of power generation.
The only course of action that could be taken by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state electric grid, was to drop large parts of the grid offline to preserve the generation plants still online, thus keeping the power flowing in part.
The result was devastating to much of Texas. The true cost of this disaster will probably not be known for some time.
However, it is vitally important that our various levels of governments come clean. For example, as of this writing San Antonio power supplier, CPS Energy filed to suspend release of public information regarding its handling of the storm. Why would they want to do that? Hiding information from the public by a government or utility is never a good idea if confidence is to be maintained. If the rate paying public is expected to buy-in to any solution, they have the right to see the underlying data about what happened, and what is proposed.
Emergency managers exercise various scenarios, determine the points of failure, develop solutions, then exercise again. That’s a proven method to prepare.
Now let’s look at the weaknesses revealed in this storm. The first major failure was of the “renewable energy” variety, specifically of the windmills and solar panel arrays. Like aircraft, ice buildup on aerodynamic surfaces (such as windmill blades) destroys their ability to produce torque to the generator. Further, the enormous weight of the ice throws the heavy rotating blade assembly out of balance, so it is designed to automatically brake to a stop. Solar panels only work during daylight and when they are not covered by an obstruction such as snow. Both of these problems occurred almost simultaneously at the start of the storm.
There went about 29% of the power grid.
ERCOT reported that blackouts were caused as electric plants of all energy sources “began tripping offline in rapid succession.”
But then as the situation worsened, some of the rolling blackouts occurred in the oil and gas producing area of West Texas called the Permian Basin. With power cut, natural gas destined to power plants was cut off, forcing even more shutdowns.
One should start to see that pattern forming here. It is called cascading. One event leads to another, then another, and another.
To understand why all this happened, one must research the planning process all Texas governments and agencies should have in order to prevent such compounding emergencies.
In a subsequent column I will discuss why Texas has its own power grid and how the federal government hobbled Texas’ ability to have access to out-of-state power during this horrible winter weather situation.
