Texas power

Darkness comes for Dallas. Photo: Brandon Wade/AP/Shutterstock Texas is the energy capital of America, producing more power from oil, gas, and wind each year than any other state in the union. Yet on Tuesday morning, 4 million of its residents woke up without electricity , amid a historic polar vortex that left Dallas colder than Anchorage. This combination of near-zero temperatures and widespread power failures killed at least eight Texans, grounded flights at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport , threatened to spoil thousands of doses of COVID-19 vaccine — and made the Texas Republican Party rue the day that it decided to give eco-socialism a chance. Or so much conservative commentary on the disaster would suggest. On Monday night, the most-watched anchor on America’s most-watched cable news channel informed his audience that the reason Texas is suffering blackouts this week is because the state’s Republican governor quietly implemented Alexandria … [Read more...] about No, the Green New Deal Did Not Cause the Texas Power Outage

AUSTIN, TEXAS - Anger over Texas' power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze mounted Tuesday as millions of residents in the energy capital of the U.S. remained shivering with no assurances that their electricity and heat — out for 36 hours or longer in many homes — would return soon or stay on once it finally does. "I know people are angry and frustrated," said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who woke up to more than 1 million people still without power in his city. "So am I." In all, between 2 and 3 million customers in Texas still had no power nearly two full days after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state's power grid and causing widespread blackouts. More bad weather, including freezing rain, was expected Tuesday night. Making matters worse, expectations that the outages would be a shared sacrifice by the state's 30 million residents … [Read more...] about ‘A Complete Bungle’: Texas’ Power Grid Fails in Record Cold

The image of energy-rich Texas is under challenge as a historic polar vortex slows or shuts down power sources like wind and natural gas. The Houston Chronicle reported on Monday about what led to, at one point, more than four million Texans being without power: The Texas power grid, powered largely by wind and natural gas, is relatively well equipped to handle the state’s hot and humid summers when demand for power soars. But unlike blistering summers, the severe winter weather delivered a crippling blow to power production, cutting supplies as the falling temperatures increased demand. Natural gas shortages and frozen wind turbines were already curtailing power output when the Arctic blast began knocking generators offline early Monday morning. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which is responsible for scheduling power and ensuring the reliability of the electrical network, declared a statewide power generation shortfall emergency and asked … [Read more...] about Winter Storm Exposes Texas Power Grid Vulnerabilities

The top official in charge of Texas's power grid said Thursday that the state had been just minutes away from a total grid failure early Monday morning when operators made the decision to cut the power and begin rolling blackouts across the state. Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), told the Texas Tribune in an interview that the state's grid was "seconds and minutes" from potentially going down, adding that damages caused by the grid failure could have caused uncontrolled blackouts lasting for months. “It needed to be addressed immediately," he said, according to the Tribune. “It was seconds and minutes [from possible failure] given the amount of generation that was coming off the system.” ADVERTISEMENT Had grid operators not acted Monday to begin controlled blackouts that have affected millions across the state for days, Magness said, the damage caused by higher power demand than supply could have caused an “indeterminately … [Read more...] about Texas power grid was ‘seconds and minutes’ from total failure, officials say

A refinery in Corpus Christi. Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images The energy crisis in Texas has exposed the glaring weak points of a regional power system designed to ignore cold weather extremes and federal oversight . Not only did the decision not to weatherize the state’s energy infrastructure result in blackouts for millions of Texans — which in turn resulted in water shortages for nearly 12 million more — preliminary data from the Texas Commission on Environment Quality shows that a spike in air pollutants occurred when petrochemical stations and oil refineries on the Gulf Coast were forced to go offline. Because electric supplies were also cut off for the plants on the coast, these refineries burned the gas in the system to prevent damage from taking place in their processing units. This practice, known as flaring, darkened the skies above the state’s massive refinery centers and sunk thousands of tons of air pollutants into the atmosphere in the span of a … [Read more...] about Texas Power Outages Caused a Spike in Air Pollutants