As many have undoubtedly heard by now, many people in Texas are without electric power. Some 2 million households are struggling to stay warm without power during a major winter storm. When the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), began implementing rolling blackouts at 1:25 a.m. Monday, the outages were intended to be implemented on a rolling basis — up to 45 minutes per affected area, according to the ERCOT.
However, many areas were continually without power before ERCOT decided on rolling blackouts and continued to be without power after that decision. “Unfortunately, if you are a customer who is currently experiencing an outage, you should be prepared to be without power for at least the rest of the day,” tweeted CenterPoint Energy.
Jackie Sargent, the general manager for Austin Energy, said Monday afternoon that based on information from ERCOT, the local power outages could extend into Tuesday afternoon.
Contrary to what one might think, the energy problem wasn’t primarily due to downed power lines. Instead, in a state that has a quarter of America’s proven natural gas reserves, the power went away because Texas has turned to wind generation — and the generators froze. This coupled with a high demand for natural gas showed the folly of depending on “green” energy as a critical component of one’s energy grid.
This gives new meaning to “Houston, we have a problem.”
Keep in mind that Texas is the top producer of crude oil and natural gas. Texas also leads the country in wind-powered generation. Wind farms in Texas typically generate up to 25,100 megawatts of energy. Almost half of that was knocked out when the turbines froze. Peak energy needs in Texas run around 70,000-75,000 megawatts.
Now wind-generated power may be all nice and green although I think the hundreds of thousands of birds killed by wind turbines might disagree. However, it is not any greener than clean natural gas when one looks at all the requirements for creating wind-generated power. And natural gas is a lot cheaper. Ramping up production via natural gas would benefit everyone.
As Andrea Widburg notes:
Perhaps Tucker Carlson said it best on his show Monday night: