By: Lilly Keitges
February 2021, Winter Storm Uri hit the North American continent and left widespread impact across the United States, northern Mexico and parts of Canada.[i] Cold weather records across the state of Texas were broken over the 10 days of Uri’s effects.[ii] First, we will look at the basics of how power grids across the contiguous United States function. Then, we will look at what happened during Winter Storm Uri that compounded into a massive electricity failure and rolling brownouts. Lastly, we will look to what could have been done prior to Winter Storm Uri for the Texas electric grid.
Electricity nationwide is managed first at the local electricity grids, which are interconnected to form larger networks across the nation for reliability and commercial purposes.[iii] The contiguous United States has three main interconnections that operate largely independently from each other: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (“ERCOT”).[iv] The Eastern Interconnection consists of 36 balancing authorities and encompasses the area east of the Rocky Mountains and a small portion of northern Texas.[v] The Western Interconnection consists of thirty-seven balancing authorities and covers the Rocky Mountains to the west coast.[vi] Lastly, about 90% of Texas is covered by the single balancing authority and interconnection ERCOT.[vii] The structure of the interconnections allows multiple routes for power to flow, a redundancy that helps prevent interruptions in service.[viii] While the interconnections manage the physical system, balancing authorities ensure that the supply and demand are finely balanced in real time and ensure the operation of the electric system runs smoothly.[ix]
ERCOT is unique because the balancing authority, interconnection and regional transmission organization are all the same entity and physical system.[x] The nature of the interconnections allows minimal energy to be transported between the systems.[xi] This makes ERCOT an “island grid” and limits the energy imported from outside its system to about 1,220 megawatts.[xii] This constraint is by design, by keeping its electricity transmissions entirely intrastate, ERCOT avoids federal regulation, which only has jurisdiction over interstate electricity transmission.[xiii] The Western Interconnection had upwards of 90,000 megawatts of capacity that Texas could have used during the February outages, but no transmission lines to convey it to the ERCOT grid.[xiv] For reference, one megawatt can power about 200 homes during peak demand.[xv]
Heating and utility systems in Texas homes are predominantly electric based.[xvi] The winter weather in Texas is usually much milder, making all-electric heating less expensive when compared with colder northern states and explains the stark contrast of all-electric heating between Texas (61%) and New York (12%).[xvii] The worst of the outages was from February 15-19, when the forecasted demand was 76,783 megawatts.[xviii] The supply at that time only reached 48,747 megawatts, a shortfall of 37%.[xix] ERCOT’s gas-fired plants, coal-fired plants, nuclear plants, and renewable energy sources all significantly underperformed during the worst of the outages.[xx] The shortfall projections related to the lack of weatherization to equipment and lack of winter preparedness can account for as much as 15,000-17,000 megawatts.[xxi] On the third day of the outage, Poweroutage.us reported 3.3 million customers in Texas were without power, while none of the states along the Canadian border were suffering from outages and the next highest was Oregon, which peaked at 330,000 customers without power due to downed power lines as opposed to Texas’ power plant and fuel supply mismanagement.[xxii]
Not only is Texas’ electricity market not federally regulated, the state also deregulated their electricity market in the 1990s.[xxiii] Prior to deregulation, electricity was regulated as a public utility and a single local provider would own the power plant, the power lines and the customer service network.[xxiv] The goal of deregulation was to create a competitive marketplace and lower prices.[xxv] Senate Bill 7 in 1999 unbundled the old utility monopolies on energy and broke them down into generation (power plants), transmission (power lines) and retail (customer service and billing).[xxvi] Transmitters remained regulated due to logistics of power lines being strung through cites but the rest of the state’s power grid became privatized and shifted from local plants producing power for local consumption to a retailer looking for the best deal on power, whether that is local or halfway across the state.[xxvii]
This past February was not the first time that Texas had encountered failing power plants and rolling blackouts in the face of a harsh winter snowstorm.[xxviii] The situation in 2011 was similar and state officials recommended winter protections for generating facilities after the rolling blackouts of 2011.[xxix] The reports then demonstrate generators and natural gas pipelines froze during the calamity and former utility executives and energy experts suggested a light amount of regulation involving winter protections to key industrial assets.[xxx] The 2011 report was also not the first time these sort of recommendations had been made, previously after a cold snap in 1989 caused outages.[xxxi]
Each time the recommendations were made they were just that, recommendations. Had the recommendations been made mandates in 2011, there likely wouldn’t have been rolling brownouts across Texas. The deregulation of Texas’ electricity market has resulted in more dangerous situations that could have been prevented if more precautions were taken. At the bare minimum, Texas needs to mandate weatherization of their equipment so as to not cause a chain of events as it did in February. It would be in the best interests for Texas to join either the Western or Eastern Interconnection because they would be able to pull excess energy from neighboring balancing authorities.
[i] Winter Storm Uri Spread Snow, Damaging Ice From Coast-to Coast, Including the Deep South (Recap), The Weather Channel, (Feb. 16, 2021), https://weather.com/safety/winter/news/2021-02-14-winter-storm-uri-south-midwest-northeast-snow-ice [https://perma.cc/DW29-7FCM].
[ii] Paul Robbins, Backup Plan Part 2: How the Texas electric grid broke, The Austin Bulldog, (Oct. 4, 2021), https://theaustinbulldog.org/backup-plan-part-2-how-the-texas-the-electric-grid-broke/ [https://perma.cc/R2VQ-7LMS].
[iii] U.S. electric system is made up of interconnections and balancing authorities, U.S. Energy Info. Admin. (July 20, 2016) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27152 [https://perma.cc/QK6H-NFLA].
[iv] Id.
[v] Id.
[vi] Id.
[vii] About ERCOT, ERCOT, http://www.ercot.com/about (Oct. 19, 2021) [https://perma.cc/6SYW-UFJH].
[viii] U.S. Energy Info. Admin., supra note iiii.
[ix] Id.
[x] Id.
[xi] Robbins, supra note ii.
[xii] Id.
[xiii] Asher Price, ‘An electrical island’: Texas has dodged federal regulation for years by having its own power grid, USA Today (Feb. 17, 2021), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-why-state-has-its-own-operated-ercot/6782380002/ [https://perma.cc/RNF4-Q8CU].
[xiv] Robbins, supra note ii.
[xv] Lynn Doan, How Many Millions Are Without Power in Texas? It’s Impossible to Know for Sure, Time (Feb. 17, 2021), https://time.com/5940232/millions-without-power-texas/ [https://perma.cc/PPZ8-CQEN].
[xvi] Robbins, supra note ii.
[xvii] Id.
[xviii] Id.
[xix] Id.
[xx] Id.
[xxi] Id.
[xxii] Id.
[xxiii] Dylan Baddour, Texas’ deregulated electricity market, explained, Houston Chron. (June 8, 2016), https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/explainer/article/texas-electric-deregulation-ERCOT-TCAP-7971360.php[https://perma.cc/8VMH-FGHC].
[xxiv] Id.
[xxv] Id.
[xxvi] Id.
[xxvii] Id.
[xxviii] Asher Price & Bob Sechler, Winter storm blackouts plagued Texas in 2011, too. Recommendations made afterward went unenforced., USA Today (Feb. 18, 2021), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/18/state-energy-winter-protections-lacking-reports-have-suggested/4490501001/ [https://perma.cc/G4S6-GPUX].
[xxix] Id.
[xxx] Id.
[xxxi] Id.