Natural gas and coal plants, more than half of the power that tripped offline during Texas’s energy crisis this week, faltered because they weren’t equipped to operate in the rare deep freeze the state experienced.
Millions of Texans spent days in the dark and, in many cases, without heat or water this week as unusually frigid winter weather led to massive spikes in the state’s energy demand that its grid wasn’t prepared to handle.
Power facilities across all fuels, including natural gas, coal, wind turbines, and nuclear units, went offline, forcing the state’s grid operator to order rotating outages. For many Texans, those outages became longer-lasting blackouts as the grid operator struggled to find enough supply to meet levels of demand typically seen only during the hottest months of the year.
At its height, around 46,000 megawatts of power generation were forced offline. Of that amount, 28,000 megawatts are derived from thermal generation, largely natural gas as well as coal and nuclear, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the grid operator. The remaining 18,000 megawatts come from wind and solar.
Energy experts and industry groups caution it is too soon to pinpoint the exact causes of each plant’s closure, as the weather event is ongoing and some data won’t be available until post-mortem inquiries are conducted.
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ERCOT, for example, hasn’t released daily outage reports yet specifying which plants went offline and when, details that will help fill in the sequence of events that led to the crisis.
Still, a major issue has been Texas’s energy equipment, including natural gas and coal plants, simply freezing up.
“One of the practices in the past was in places like Texas, you would never have designed a power plant that runs at a temperature of 5 degrees, or zero degrees, or things like that,” said Le Xie, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Texas A&M University and affiliate with its energy institute.
The problem isn’t that natural gas and coal plants can’t operate in low temperatures. In fact, industry groups often point to coal and natural gas as pillars of grid resilience during winter storms in the Northeast and other colder regions because they provide dispatchable baseload power.
Those plants, though, are prepared for deep freezes. They’re equipped with devices that resist ice and defreeze.
In Texas, few power facilities are weatherized for the cold. That is even after recommendations from federal regulators that power plants undergo winterization following a 2011 cold-weather event that also led to some rotating power outages.
In response to this week’s events, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said during a Thursday press conference he has asked the Legislature to mandate winterization of power plants and the grid, and he is calling on state lawmakers to provide the funding to do so.
During this week’s crisis, natural gas plants tripped offline as equipment froze, both at power facilities themselves and at wellheads, leading to a drop-off in supplies, experts said. Tripping is the sudden and often unexpected cutting off of a power facility’s connection to the grid, similar to a circuit breaker.
The American Petroleum Institute cited data showing natural gas production in the U.S. south central region down 45% from the week prior due to wellhead freeze-offs and processing plant outages caused by the extremely cold weather.
Natural gas suppliers compensated for lost output by withdrawing from underground storage when possible. The Energy Department is projecting this week to have been the largest withdrawal from natural gas storage ever in the south central region.
It is possible some natural gas supply was diverted from the power sector to service increased demand for heating, the American Petroleum Institute also said. The oil group said Texas meets 60% of its heating demand with electricity and 40% with natural gas, and the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s main energy regulator, had ordered energy providers to prioritize gas deliveries to homes, hospitals, and other “human needs customers” over power plants.
Still, natural gas plants overall ran a little more than they would have on a typical winter day, said Ken Medlock, senior director of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy’s Center for Energy Studies, who said his house had just regained power Wednesday evening.
Facilities that didn’t trip offline ran way more than they would have normally, but “the trouble is the system needed all of it to run all the time,” he said.
That is because demand was much higher. According to the American Gas Association, natural gas demand in the power sector increased 48.6% over the normal winter day, and residential and commercial sector gas demand increased by 28%. Sunday and Monday set the two-day record for natural gas deliveries, the gas group noted.
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Coal plants were also dealing with frozen equipment. Medlock said many of the coal plant closures were caused by feed water needed to run the facility’s steam turbine technology freezing, making it impossible to run the plants.
Temperatures will rise and equipment will start to thaw in the coming days, but it’s unlikely the political scrutiny from Abbott, other state officials, federal regulators, and Congress will any time soon.
Federal regulatory bodies, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, have opened a joint investigation into the issue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also announced the House Energy and Commerce Committee will look into the situation, and Senate Energy Committee Chairman Joe Manchin is planning a hearing on the crisis.
Weatherizing Texas’s energy facilities is likely to be a top item on their lists, but policymakers will have to grapple with how to mandate those upgrades without raising electricity costs.
“I have been here for 40 years and know that we’ve never had anything like this. There will be some periods of chill, but they are very short-lived, and they don’t go as low as it has happened this time,” said Chanan Singh, a grid reliability expert and electrical and computer engineering professor at Texas A&M University, also an affiliate with its energy institute.
“The main issue here is that this rather is an outlier,” he added. “You can always design for something more, but then it’s an issue of cost.”
Whereas power plants in the Northeast and the Midwest weatherize for the cold out of necessity, there’s no commercial incentive for Texas facilities to do so, Medlock said.
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In fact, it could put facilities at a competitive disadvantage if they spend a lot of money to upgrade for winter weather when others aren’t making those same investments. The solution, he said, is to implement a systemwide standard requiring weatherization.
Otherwise, “it’s sort of like, why would I spend a bunch of money for something that’s going to happen for four days every 10 years? That’s the commercial question that gets asked at the end of the day,” Medlock added. “Then, when those four days happen, you kind of wish you had, but at that point, it’s too late.”
