Power Outages are Bigger in Texas Too

I’m a native Texan. We do everything bigger there. This week that includes power outages in record-breaking cold weather.

Texas has plenty of energy. Heck, Houston likes to say it is the energy capital of the world! The grid for distributing electricity is the beast in this case.

The Big USA Power Grids

The Lower 48 states in the USA have three big electric power grids: Eastern, Western and most of Texas. As electric infrastructure was getting well established in the 1930s, Texas chose to make its own grid. Some chunks of the state aren’t in it. I grew up in the southeastern corner, which is part of the Eastern grid. But most of the state is on the independent state grid, and connections with other grids are intentionally very few to minimize opportunities for federal rules to apply.

Why Did the Texas Grid Fail?

You will hear a lot of people say the current weather has wrought havoc with power generation. That’s true, but it isn’t the whole story.

As an engineer I caution that news stories, even magazine articles, are too short to give you more than small slices of the picture. Weatherizing some components is not enough. Even if Texas thawed out all the frozen devices that hinder power generation, the grid would remain its Achilles heel. For example, I have yet to see any article mention that older electric grids are less flexible, less resilient, less able to quickly adapt to major fluctuations than the most modern grids.

Let’s put this at a comprehensible scale. I’ve seen an entire local development plan for over 10,000 homes stymied because its power grid is conventional. The grid cannot tolerate additional demand from more than a couple hundred new homes, and at the same time cannot tolerate reduced demand if a particular business that is a major customer switches to solar power and no longer buys power from the grid. Either change would collapse it. Modernizing the local grid for resilience would take time and money. The electric company refuses to make that investment, reducing its profit and paving the way for customers to leave it by switching to solar or wind power.

Magnify that situation to almost the entire state of Texas and you begin to grasp the scope of the problem.

Does It Matter for Anyone Else?

Don’t feel too smug about living somewhere else. How resilient is your grid? The fragile conventional local grid I mentioned is about 4000 miles away from Texas, and hardly any ordinary citizens using that grid are aware of how delicate their supply of power is. The consequences are not limited to a once-in-a-lifetime event like the current weather in Texas. The consequences are also homes not built and solar or wind power not implemented to replace fossil fuel.

We may do everything bigger in Texas, but there are lessons in this collapse for plenty of other places.