In mid-February 2021, Texas was hit by a devastating winter storm. The entire state plunged into freezing temperatures along with snow, a rare occurrence in Texas. Texas went into a widespread power outage, which affected some of the most important winter necessities like heating and clean water. Texas’s power grid is not connected to the rest of the nation’s, which left most of the country except for Texas’s neighboring states mostly in the clear. According to the Associated Press, there have been at least 58 deaths caused by the storms due to carbon monoxide poisoning, hypothermia, car accidents, drowning, and house fires.
Many have questioned how this was able to happen. If the rest of the country was able to withstand winter storms without this level of disaster, how come Texas could not? The New York Times believes that the winter storms were caused by a variety of reasons. Because of the cold weather, too many residents were using their heating systems and pushed the limits of the grid’s emergency power usage. Also, many gas operated power plants stopped functioning correctly because of the freezing conditions, and wind turbines froze. Texas’s electric grid is equipped for extremely high summer temperatures, which result in a high demand for air conditioning, but not equipped for these “record-breaking” freezing temperatures.
The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, claimed that the power outages were caused by the malfunctioning of wind turbines. The New York Times debunked this myth, claiming that only about 7% of Texas’s power relied on wind powered energy. In addition to this, wind turbines can be equipped with heating systems, which is how they function in colder climates, and gas plants can store oil so that they can switch to burning fuels in the occurrence that there is no natural gas available. The reason why Texas was not ready for these events can be traced back to the time when a decision to deregulate electricity was made in 1999. In a consensus, voters decided to give control of Texas’s power grids to a market of private generators, transmission companies, and energy retailers. This was seen as a beneficial way of creating competition in the energy industry. Because of the competition, less money was invested into weather protection because there was no incentive to do so. This deregulation caused Texas’s main energy systems to be unprepared for the deadly storms which happened.
Today and in the future, climate change will clearly transform the reliability of the weather, creating more of a need for weather protection and renewable energy all across the country.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/climate/texas-power-grid-failures.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/climate/texas-blackouts-disinformation.html
