Kind: captions
Language: en
texans are still reeling from the power
outage crisis
earlier this year all the suffering and
the terrible experience that people have
is just
is heart-wrenching and we never want
this to happen again
but many experts see what happened as a
sign of things to come
and not just in texas let's use this as
a huge example of what we don't want
as a community as a nation
more on that in a minute first texas
to unpack what happened here let's take
things step by step
first freezing arctic air usually pinned
way farther north by a ring of rapid
wind
called the jet stream made its way
southward
plunging much of north america into a
deep freeze
that engulfed texas it was colder than
normal for longer than normal and it
affected every single county in the
state
there are some winters where we never
hit freezing in this case
the challenge we had was the consistency
day after day after day
no warming up no getting to above
freezing
texas is powered roughly half by natural
gas
20 by coal another 20 percent by wind
and solar
and 10 percent by nuclear with summer
temperatures regularly hitting
90 plus even 100 plus degrees fahrenheit
texans plan for heat the state doesn't
design its power plants and natural gas
system
to work in super cold conditions we are
constantly
designing our plants to take heat off
ventilation
exhaust systems there's a lot of cooling
that happens with recycled water
and you're trying to keep that plant as
cool as possible
and in the north you'll find power
plants fully
encased with the permanent structure
brick steel
all the things that they need they will
also create permanent coverings
for those exposed lines and we just
don't have that structure
most power plants use heat to drive
turbines to create electricity
texas temporarily winterizes those
plants each year
through insulation portable heaters
scaffolding
but when the bitterly cold weather
descended in mid-february
a lot of the infrastructure for
delivering electricity
just grows not just for delivering
electricity but also
the equipment for making electricity
froze
we had freeze-offs in the natural gas
system that actually froze at the
wellhead and clogged the wellhead or
froze in the equipment or in the
gathering lines of pipelines
we couldn't get the gas to the power
plants and we have four nuclear reactors
in texas one of them turned off because
of a frozen water pump
a pump that would usually help circulate
water
water that gets heated to form steam and
drive the turbines
we have several coal plants that turned
off because of frozen equipment at the
coal plants
along with some snow on solar panels and
then some of the wind turbines had ice
so we had outages throughout the system
these outages turned off electricity in
different parts of the state
including sections of the natural gas
system that are electrically operated
pumps anti-freeze injection systems etc
and that led to the shutdown of even
more power plants
it became a set of cascading failures
so we have a water problem freezing
water become a gas problem
become a power problem become a bigger
gas problem become a bigger power
problem
become a water problem in a humanitarian
crisis at the same time across the state
demand was surging as frigid texans were
trying to heat their homes
six out of every 10 homes in the state
use electricity for heating
the lack of supply combined with the
spike in demand
meant trouble for the grid the network
used to deliver electricity to consumers
to avoid massive equipment failures
parts of the system are programmed to
trip
off if they get overloaded which can
happen when a lot of people
suddenly demand more electricity than
normal all at once
we had to bring things back into balance
or the whole grid would have gone down
and once the whole grid goes down it
takes weeks or months to bring it back
up
and we were within seconds to minutes of
complete collapse
that's because when demand far outstrips
supply
basically when things fall too far out
of balance it can trip
all the power plants causing a
system-wide blackout
the electric reliability council of
texas or
ercot which administers texas's grid and
serves about 85 percent of the state
leapt into action ercot is like a
traffic air traffic controller
they can see everything we rely on
ercot to tell us when they think it's
going to get really bad
and this situation was really bad power
had to be turned off
immediately not with rolling blackouts
but with controlled blackouts
that descended on certain parts of the
state and lasted for a couple
and in some cases several days so some
circuits are on and some are off where
we turned them off and kept them off
low-income communities tend to be more
vulnerable in a crisis like this
due to poor infrastructure and fewer
resources to facilitate
recovery one of the challenges was that
when it comes to its grid
texas is a land unto itself in the
united states there are three grids east
west and texas
texas happens to have an independent
grid for a variety of reasons like being
untethered by
federal regulations and the fact that
unlike most other states
texas can generate enough power within
its borders to be self-sufficient
we generate power we transmit it we
distribute it and we serve customers
but it means if things go wrong we have
trouble importing power from neighboring
states
so we can't lean on our neighbor the way
most states can
we're really on our own when it comes to
dealing with tough weather and so
it's all great until it doesn't work and
then things can fall apart quickly
so what happened in texas is really it's
not just about texas it's about
aging infrastructure it's about the need
to rethink our energy infrastructure the
need to build in resilience
in response to a changing climate in
many many different parts of the world
the risks 20 30 40 years ago are
different from the risks that we face
now
right now we're building our
infrastructure for yesterday's weather
not tomorrow's weather the next 100
years will be different we know this
that the weather events will be more
extreme and more frequent which means
hotter and colder
wetter and drier so we have to deal with
this and design for that
we need reliability and we need
affordability while we work on
making the environment better we need to
do outage management by a whole
different way
so people aren't out all day while we
still try to prevent a blackout
now what happened in texas while rare
was not unanticipated
a decade ago in february 2011 a winter
storm blew through texas
leading to rolling blackouts across the
state
and that led to a major report with
their official assessment and their
recommendations
recommendations such as winterization
winterizing our plants so they work
better when it's cold
just like they do in northern climates
like in minnesota or the northeast
winterization could cost perhaps tens of
billions of dollars
implementing the solutions should take
years to do
a decade was enough and it looks like we
didn't do it very much or certainly not
enough
now we go to 2021 this will match
hurricane harvey or even be more in
terms of damage
the damage caused by the february freeze
is expected to cost texas about 130
billion dollars
well above the estimated cost of
winterizing we can do other things like
consider connecting to other grids so we
can get reliability benefits from other
states
we could diversify the fuel supply so
we're not so reliant on fossil fuels
we could integrate other technologies
that let us have either more resilience
to bring the grid back faster
or to prevent the collapse in the first
place and then make sure solutions are
implemented in an equitable way they've
been called for upgrading
grid level infrastructure over the
course of the past decade in a place
like texas
the question really is why won't be
prepared
to handle such a catastrophe we're an
example of what can happen
if you ignore reality if the most energy
abundant region in the world
can run short on energy it can happen
anywhere so climate science can be
integrated into our energy planning to
make the energy systems perform
better that's what we need to do