Even as millions of customers remained trapped in their homes with no power amid unprecedented Arctic weather conditions, the energy emergency gripping Texas sparked a furious blame-game over the role of wind power.
Texas's 33GW of wind, the largest of any US state, its thermal generation fleet, its network operator, its grid and its power companies were all in the firing line from various quarters as a furious row erupted across America over the shock crisis.
The main Texas grid operator late Tuesday struggled to restore electricity to millions of customers as a brutal winter storm with record cold temperatures spiked demand, while crippling fossil fuel generators and about two-thirds of rated wind capacity in the largest US state power market.
At 1100 CST (Central Standard Time), Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had 46GW of generation capacity off-line including about 28GW of thermal – coal, natural gas and nuclear – and 18GW of renewables, mainly wind. That is more than half of what ERCOT planners said would be available in its service area for winter peak demand that hit a record 69.1GW on Monday (it was about 43.5GW as temperatures rose within 10 degrees or above freezing across the state.
In mid-January, ERCOT's wind fleet totaled 22.9GW and utility-scale solar capacity was 3.85GW.
'Catastrophic impacts'
ERCOT, which serves 90% of the state’s electric load and largest metropolitan areas still had a 13GW supply-demand imbalance, down from a high of 34GW, forcing rolling blackouts to prevent “catastrophic impacts” to the grid, CEO Bill Magness said on a Wednesday conference call. As many as three million homes and businesses were without power as swaths of Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston went dark.
“The amount of time that people of Texas have had to be without service for electricity during a time of extreme cold is terrible. It is unacceptable,” he said. “We know millions of people are suffering. We have no other priority than getting them electricity. No other priority.”
The Sunday storm dumped snow on all 254 counties in the sprawling state for the first time in history but it was the frigid temperatures, reportedly as low as -22 degrees C, associated with it that later drove unprecedented demand side growth and disabled multiple generators, according to Magness.
ERCOT issued an emergency alert on Monday and began imposing rotating outages, leaving it transmission operators to decided how and where to shed load.
Dan Woodfin, senior director of grid system operations, said curtailment of natural gas supplies has been a major factor in the ongoing shortfalls of electricity supply. So far this year, gas provided 51% of generating capacity in ERCOT, wind 24.8%, coal 13.4%, nuclear 4.9%, solar 3.8% and the rest other technologies.
“Most generation that tripped or came offline today primarily had to do with issues on the natural gas system. Getting gas from frozen wellheads through the pipes to the generators to the consumer demand,” he said.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas and state legislature oversee ERCOT, a non-profit corporation.
Finger-pointing as residents suffer
The prolonged outages as a second winter snow storm arrived in central Texas today led to criticism of ERCOT from Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, amid finger-pointing over the role wind is playing between critics and supporters.
“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours,” said Abbott, who called for its leadership to resign and the Texas legislature to perform an autopsy on ERCOT's performance before and after the storm. “The people who have fallen short with regard to the power are the private power generation companies.”
Those comments drew a sharp rebuke in an editorial from The Wall Street Journal. "Ah, yes, blame private power companies . . . that are regulated by government," it said, noting that state and federal energy policies that promote renewables have created market distortions and reduced grid reliability. "The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather."
The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power.
The Texas Democratic Party blamed Abbott and ruling Republicans for the blackouts.
“Texans across the state are dying in the cold, and some Texans are without access to the medicine and healthcare they need during the middle of a pandemic. A failure to plan for this winter storm and years of deregulation of our power system has led to this moment,” said party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa. "Greg Abbott must be held accountable for his lack of planning.”
Other wind critics restated longstanding claims that the intermittent technology is unreliable and often absent or underperforms during peak demand periods with ERCOT being the latest example.
That criticism prompted a volcanic response from Heather Zichal, CEO of the newly-formed American Clean Power Association, a national trade group based in Washington, DC.
'Disgraceful anatagonism'
“It is disgraceful to see the longtime antagonists of clean power – who attack it whether it is raining, snowing, or the sun is shining – engaging in a politically opportunistic charade misleading Americans to promote an agenda that has nothing to do with restoring power to Texas communities," she said.
"Most of the power that went offline was gas, coal, or oil. It is an extreme weather problem, not a clean power problem. While some try to distract from their own failure and point fingers to slow the transition to a clean energy future, America’s renewable energy companies are working around the clock to put additional power onto the system to assist Texans during this difficult time."
American Council for Renewable Energy (ACORE) CEO Greg Wetstone said: "The serious problems on the grid today in Texas and much of the nation's heartland reinforce the importance of critical investment in our nation's grid infrastructure. The challenges are not due to the energy transition, they are due to an outdated grid that's incapable of handling an increasing number of climate-driven extreme weather events."
Cold temperatures also were causing electricity supply shortages in the northern Texas Panhandle served by Xcel Energy and states to the north including Oklahoma and Nebraska .
Wetstone's comments were unlikely to be received well by ERCOT or Texas utility regulators who last decade oversaw an $8bn nation-leading expansion of long-haul 345kV transmission lines to tap low-cost wind and solar resource. ERCOT has been able to incorporate more renewables than any US grid manager, in part, because of continual grid infrastructure and operating improvements.
ERCOT officials, meanwhile, did not single out wind as the principal cause of the ongoing supply problems. Still, the amount of nameplate wind power capacity that ERCOT indicated is off-line was far higher than implied by the clean energy lobbies and supporters and the 2-4GW in Monday news reports.
Woodfin revealed that blade icing issues extended beyond West Texas, where most turbines are located, to those along the state's southern Gulf of Mexico coast. The availability of turbines there better tracks demand in major load centres, making their electricity more valuable.
Woodfin cautioned that nameplate capacity should not be confused with the average 30% capacity that wind turbines, and solar PV arrays, normally operate across Texas in the winter. ERCOT had planned for wind to provide about 6GW of capacity this week.
"It varies by region. We’re not actually losing 16GW but one-third of that when we are calculating it from a capacity standpoint. For thermal, we are counting megawatt for megawatt," he said.
Actual power production today from remaining turbines in service was 3.4GW at 0100 CST, only 800MW at 0900 and 2GW at 1100, according to ERCOT.
Some solar arrays weren't producing power due to cloudy conditions since the storm and most of them lack onsite battery storage.
Updates throughout
