ERCOT said its math showed the state ready. The grid operator for most of the state, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, predicted some increased demand as people cranked up furnaces. “Bitter cold expected and near-blizzard conditions possible. “Heavy snow and blowing snow possible,” forecasters in Fort Worth warned on February 12. The National Weather Service sent out the word of approaching trouble: 3 to 8 inches of total snow accumulations in Dallas-Fort Worth. “The idea that wind is responsible for these outages is actually just absurd,” Michael Webber, an engineering professor and energy expert at the University of Texas, told the neutral fact-checking service PolitiFact, which concluded that the campaign to blame renewables was a “false narrative.” (Fox News Channel screenshot) Clear failure However, data from the state’s grid-managing agency and analyses by independent experts at Texas universities and elsewhere indicated cold weather problems at thermal energy facilities (coal, nuclear and mainly natural gas) were by far the principal reason for the power crisis. Other conservative politicians and media outlets echoed that February 17 allegation, particularly targeting frozen wind turbines. Texas Governor Greg Abbott claimed on Fox News that weather-related reductions in electricity from wind and solar energy were to blame for the state’s massive blackouts. In both cases, the stakes could not be higher: people’s health, safety, and welfare. The Texas grid’s collapse and climate change are so linked, both in origin and perhaps in solution, that decisions about one will affect the other. The two risks have converged at a historic moment – as the United States, under a new administration, restarts efforts to address climate change and, in a bigger sense, begins rethinking how we produce, use, and even imagine energy. Texas faces both a fragile electric grid, still driven mostly by fossil fuels despite renewable energy gains, and the certainty of human-induced climate disruptions caused mostly by the worldwide use of those same fossil fuels. It was consistent with the state’s non-response to repeated warnings about another long-term and intimately related risk. This failure of Texas governors, lieutenant governors, House speakers, legislators, and appointed and elected regulators to act on deeply researched, nonpartisan findings – offered in hopes of curtailing future catastrophes – was not unique. Texas responded by ordering more reports. The warning came with a detailed to-do list. “And when they do,” investigators concluded, “the cost in terms of dollars and human hardship is considerable.” Texas went on notice in 2011, after the last polar locomotive crashed the state’s natural-gas and coal-fired power plants for days: Armor those plants and the natural-gas system against the cold, the warning went, and do it soon – because this will happen again when more severe cold snaps arrive. The collapse of Texas was more a result of habitual neglect, the predictable – predicted – consequence of a catastrophic failure to heed a plain warning a decade ago. In the language of law, what happened was a force majeure, an unpredictable, unavoidable “act of God.”īut it wasn’t. Some places, such as data centers, could not get diesel for backup generators. Whole cities were under boil-water orders. Water failed, too, as pipes and mains burst, and treatment and pumping stations lost power. But the real proof huddled behind closed doors: millions without electricity and therefore without heat, some in grave danger, some desperately seeking warmth in their running cars, only to die from carbon monoxide poisoning.Īt the worst, about 4 million households, businesses, and institutions, most in the biggest metro areas, were in the cold and dark. Evidence of disaster lay across much of a state in shock: snow, ice, and single-digit cold.
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