The 2021 Great Texas Freeze

During a historic cold snap that left millions of Texans without electricity, water, and heat for days, claims that the state’s use of renewable energy sources, specifically wind energy, was to blame circulated on television and social media. These claims aren't necessarily wrong but they are very misleading. The root cause: record cold temperatures that affected natural gas transportation to natural gas generators, combined with the over-reliance on natural gas generation which is the complementary energy source to make Texas' wind energy usable on the grid.

A brutal winter storm in February of 2021, left millions of Texans without power and caused power prices to dramatically surge has highlighted the need for effective planning during extreme weather events.

Residents in over 100 of Texas' 254 counties were told to boil their drinking water as water treatment plants suffered from energy blackouts. Upward of 12 million people in the state -- the country’s second largest with a population of roughly 29 million -- had either no drinking water on tap in their homes or had drinking water available only intermittently.

By February 17th of 2021, electricity and natural gas were out for 2.7 million households in Texas. The state has lost 40% of its generating capacity, with natural gas wellheads being frozen off, along with wind turbines, frozen to a stop.

According to the final report from the Texas Department of State Health Services, 246 deaths were attributed to the Great Texas Freeze, spread out across 77 of the state's counties.

Who is to blame? Is it wind power, is it natural gas, or is it a combination of both?

When you build a grid that has a tremendous amount of intermittent wind and solar a tremendous amount of natural gas is needed to complement that wind so it is usable on the grid. As we learned in chapter 1 - inefficient SCGTs (Simple Cycle Gas Turbines) backup wind energy. SCGTs take double the natural gas to produce the same amount of electricity.

Any engineer could legitimately argue that due to the amount of wind generation on the Texas grid there is an abnormal amount of inefficient natural gas-powered electricity generation. A valid conclusion could be reached that had there not been so many inefficient producers on the grid that less natural gas would have been required to produce the same amount of electricity.

But, who is really to blame? Wellheads can be protected from freeze-off in many different ways during extreme weather events and many of these freeze-off protection methods are not expensive. Requiring well operators to install freeze-off protection could have saved 246 lives and saved billions of dollars in lost production.

Why does Texas, an oil and gas state, have so much wind generation? Unlike in many other states, Texas has an area within the state (the High Plains region) where the wind's frequency and strength make wind more profitable than in many other states. Additionally, Texas oil tycoon - T. Boone Pickens was an early adopter and investor into wind energy.

T. Boone Pickens used his wealth to lobby the Texas legislature, the Texas Railroad Commission, The Texas Public Utilities Commission, and ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) to create a plan and greater acceptance of wind power.

Pickens was so impressed with wind energy he wanted to reduce American dependence on imported oil by investing approximately $1 trillion in new wind turbine farms for power generation, which he believed would allow the natural gas used for power generation to be shifted to fuel trucks and other heavy vehicles with Compressed natural gas.

Pickens pitched the "Pickens Plan" in 2008 to presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. The Pickens Plan with wind energy was short-lived. The Fracking Revolution dramatically lowered the cost of natural gas and very quickly killed the economics of wind energy production.

Very famously, Pickens quickly abandoned wind energy in the Pickens Plan and focused on transitioning transportation fuels (gasoline and diesel) to natural gas to become energy-independent (this still appears to be a very sound idea). Texas politicians, however, were too invested in wind to abandon what they started. While wind and solar are initially a good value for consumers - there are very few areas in the United States where they are projected to remain profitable and competitive without subsidy or mandate. Overall, intermittent technologies produce a far more complicated grid that trades safety, security, competitiveness, and reliability for environmentalism. When production subsidies are considered, every country that has implemented significant amounts of intermittent technologies has higher energy prices. This makes those countries less competitive in the world-market.

While there is still a lot of interest in wind and solar technology as a viable energy source to combat climate change - we do not know if wind and solar are a net benefit to the environment or a net negative. In how many areas where wind and solar are on the grid do we produce more GGEs (Greenhouse Gas Emissions) from inefficient complementary energy sources than we otherwise would have from a more highly efficient primary energy source that is NOT intermittent?

Seemingly, every lobbyist and special interest group wants to theoretically estimate how many solar panels and wind turbines we can fit on the electrical grid - and the answer is very complex.

Can wind and solar displace more GGEs than what is produced by the inefficency they create on the grid? Is wind and solar reliable enough in an extreme weather even or do they introduce more risk and more susceptibility to catastrophy? After the great "Texas Freeze" these are all questions that need to be asked about every grid.

State legislators should be making the decisions on the acceptability of risk to a state - not federal bureaucrats.

While wind and solar have their place in some areas - just because a company can be profitable operating wind and solar generation in a particular area does not necessarily mean they are a good deal for consumers.

While natural gas appears to be a bridge to a future technology - most experts do not believe that future will include a substantive amount of renewable energy.

• If a state is relying on natural gas for both residential heat and for electricity - legislators should ensure that wellheads are protected from freeze-off events.

• Texas became overreliant on natural gas because of the amount of wind and solar placed on their grid. While it made some economic sense to expand wind power so much in Texas a large reason for the disproportionate reliance on wind was the (WPTC) Wind Production Tax Credit. Wind companies reaped billions of federal dollars that allowed them to lobby for more wind projects. In Texas, because there is an area where the wind is constant, most experts agree that the Texas grid did substantially reduce GGEs. However, those GGEs came at the price of lives and the price of a catastrophy. State legislators may want to adopt a zero-risk policy and then place a measure on the ballot if citizen want to incur greater risks for either better energy prices or better environmental practices.

• If the goal of adding wind and solar technologies to the grid is to reduce carbon emissions - then the net carbon emissions for the grid should be calculated before their addition and tracked to see if they do reduce grid emissions.

• State legislators should set goals for electrical transmission reliability during extreme weather events. It is advisable that State legislators create policies that can mitigate the severity of a terrorist attack on their transmission infrastructure.