What’s happening in Texas?
Record cold forces natural gas, coal, nuclear and wind offline, while solar production increased 75%
Millions of people across Texas are in the midst of extended power outages after a severe winter storm hit the state in the early morning of Monday, February 15. What happened?
Texas has its own power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which coordinates hundreds of power plants and thousands of miles of transmission lines to deliver electricity to 90% of the state. Four days before the storm hit, ERCOT was “anticipating record-breaking demand”, and directed plant operators “to prepare their facilities for the expected cold weather”. Were they ready? Well, no.
At the height of the crisis, 185 power generating units dropped offline, representing 46 GW of power, forcing electric utilities to cut service to millions. To take a closer look at how these failures affected the grid, I used Carbonara, a grid carbon intelligence platform, to chart the fuel mix over the past week. Here’s the query:
curl -X GET 'https://api.singularity.energy/v1/region_events/search?region=ERCO&event_type=raw.generated_fuel_mix&start=2021-02-120T00:00:00Z' --header 'X-Api-Key: <key>'Plotted over time, we can clearly see the cascade of failures beginning early Monday morning, as natural gas, coal, nuclear, and wind all fall off a cliff:
We can also look at each fuel type’s average generation before and after the storm to see the full cumulative effect:
Even reliable power generation failed
The nuclear failure is particularly notable, as nuclear is the most reliable power source by far, and is expected to run at full capacity 24/7. But at 05:26 CST, one of two reactors at the South Texas Project (STP) nuclear power station fell victim to the unprecedented cold, and dropped off the grid. Coal, another core baseload generator in Texas, is running at about 70% capacity three days after the storm. The most significant factor is natural gas, which has fallen from a peak of 44 GW before the storm down to 33.5 GW Thursday morning, a 10.5 GW difference representing enough power for about 2 million homes.
Blaming renewables is misleading
Some Texas officials have placed the blame on frozen wind turbines and an over-reliance on renewables, and ERCOT is reporting that 18 GW of wind and solar is offline. While Texas does have a maximum capacity of about 25 GW of wind power (the most in the US), the data shows that wind was peaking at 9 GW before the storm and has fallen to about half that. Solar actually increased after the storm, running at 90% of its 3.8 GW maximum capacity.
Sources
The data used in this analysis originates from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects data from regional power grids like ERCOT on a daily basis. It’s accessible through Carbonara, along with other information such as historical, real-time, and forecasted carbon emissions generated by power grids across the country, and import and export flows between regions — perhaps an opportunity to monitor a burgeoning international incident as Texas and Mexico quarrel over natural gas exports.
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