Everyone Has An Answer For Texas Power Freeze-off
“Several people with power regulatory and energy investigation experience discussed what we still do not know about the Texas blackout. They pointed to needed data as well as ways to prevent another such event. ”
There is not a day that goes past when we do not see someone telling us what needs to be done about the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) fiasco that produced days of power blackouts for upwards of five million Texans the week following Valentine’s Day last month. Yes, everyone’s solution is designed to ensure that such a humanitarian disaster does not happen again. The problem is that all the proposed solutions we have seen so far entail legislation, which is being rushed in the Texas legislature because the body is due to end its biannual session in a matter of weeks. The risk is that everyone continues to operate with imperfect knowledge of what specifically happened with generating plants and fuel providers that caused or worsened the power blackout. We worry over the tendency of politicians, in response to the loudest voices, to “shoot first and aim second” with their pet proposals. As one webinar moderator put it, “everyone seems to be reciting their talking points.” Not particularly helpful.
One of the best webinars on the Texas disaster was sponsored by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP). The webinar was moderated by David Hill, CGEP Adjunct Senior Research Scholar, and Cheryl LaFleur, CGEP Distinguished Visiting Fellow. Mr. Hill served as General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Energy and Mrs. LaFleur was a Commissioner and Chairman at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). This webinar was part of a series referred to as “an energy dialogue.” This session involved Alison Silverstein, who served as advisor to Chairman Pat Wood III at the Texas Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and at FERC. She was a lead author of the FERC’s report on the 2003 Northeast power blackout that impacted parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Canadian province of Ontario on August 14, 2003, and began just after 4:10 p.m. EDT. The analysis of the causes of this blackout helped lead to enactment of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which changed energy policy by providing tax incentives for all forms of green energy, opened the Outer Continental Shelf to leases for other energy sources besides oil and gas, exempted fracking fluids from regulation, and repealed the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, among the laundry list of energy items included. Did this legislation truly address the cause of the blackout?
Exhibit 10. 2003 Northeast Power Blackout SOURCE: Wikipedia
According to Wikipedia, the blackout’s cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, in Akron, Ohio, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute power load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of much of the Northeast regional electricity distribution system, impacting an estimated 10 million people in southern and central Ontario, and 45 million people in eight U.S. states. Most power was restored by midnight, while some was recovered as early as 6 p.m. Full power, however, was not restored to New York City and Toronto until August 16th. The blackout was the world’s second most widespread outage in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. It was more widespread than the Northeast blackout of 1965, which created party-time at our college.
Mrs. Silverstein made several points in her opening comments. She pointed out that while the Texas blackout received the most attention because it was so massive and lasted so long, it was not the only system to be impacted. She pointed to the blackouts in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, all of whom experienced similar weather as Texas. None of the other electricity systems were as impacted, largely because they had interconnections to regions that were not experiencing such bad weather, and the duration of their bad weather was not as long.
She highlighted that the Valentine’s Day storm was preceded by an earlier storm that exhausted the sand and chemical supplies of many Texas cities and left roads dangerous and impassable for days that inhibited repairs and recovery efforts. There were many facilities that were not identified as critical, or identified as to their location (hospitals, water and wastewater systems, pipeline compressor stations, community warming centers, and more), and therefore became subject to power outages. Medically-at-risk individuals and families were often not identified and protected by their utilities, which contributed to some of the storm-related deaths. Importantly, many of those critical facilities that lost power did not have backup power systems with on-site fuel to support them when their power failed. Texas transmission and distribution utilities have such large circuits they could not rotate outages among circuits and customers once they protected those circuits with critical facilities, because they had used up the grid’s remaining generation capacity.
Mrs. Silverstein also was critical of the communication efforts of the energy industry, ERCOT, and city and state leaders for not using the days immediately ahead of the worst of the storm to warm people of the potential problems. In hindsight, many key leaders in the electricity industry and government failed to anticipate how bad this storm might become. It is not like there was not warning, as the National Weather Service issued an alert warning about bitter cold and wintery weather arriving beginning on February 9th, five days ahead of the worst of the bad weather and bitter cold. In fact, the head of ERCOT told his board of directors, who were meeting as the cold front was arriving, that Texas will experience “a little winter weather.” The understatement of all time.
Exhibit 11. We Were Certainly Warned About The Storm SOURCE: NOAA
Although there are some issues that need to be addressed, such as the extended duration of peak power prices, fixing the structural issues with the grid’s operations should receive serious examination and consideration before we start revising operations. Mrs. Silverstein pointed to several data issues that need to be studied. For example, the grid was becoming unstable before the load shedding that commenced at 1:23 a.m. on February 15th. Load was shed at 1:20 a.m. as the grid was becoming unstable. She would like to know more about why the grid was becoming unstable and who and what was shut down.
She also said that the storm started on February 11th, and she would like to know about the customers lost at that that time and those brought back onto the grid subsequently by distribution companies. Were customers forced off because of transmission congestion or was it due to the inability to generate power? She also would like to see the daily natural gas production data prior to February 14th to understand what issues producers were having with their wells and treating facilities, as compared to issues with pipelines and electric generators. Mrs. Silverstein commented on these data issues, along with others, but pointed out that the responsible parties were reluctant to release data. At that point, the three presenters launched into a discussion of the capabilities of the Department of Energy and FERC to secure such data. We have seen comments from reporters about the inability to get more data, despite using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Exhibit 12. Grid Frequency And Generation Outages SOURCE: Live Power
The chart from Live Power showing the grid frequency for February 9-16 in red and the generation capacity of all power plants it monitors within ERCOT in blue highlights the period at 1:55 a.m. on February 15th when the frequency dropped below the danger point for the stability of the entire grid. Our next chart (Exhibit 13) from ERCOT shows the frequency between 1:23 and 2:05 a.m. on February 15th in greater detail. We can see how the load was shed in incremental steps beginning with the initial 1,000 megawatts (MW) at 1:23 a.m. and the final 2,000 MW at 2:01 a.m., bringing the cumulative load shed during that time span to 10,500 MW.
However, if one looks at the frequency line in Exhibit 12 to the left of the point at which with the frequency experiences the sharp drop, there is another sharp downward spike. What was happening at that point with respect to generation and load? It seems to coincide with a decline in generating capacity from plants monitored by Live Power. Further to the left, we see other times when the fluctuations in the grid’s frequency and variations in generation capacity are evident. These are periods that Mrs. Silverstein says she would like to see the data to understand what was happening, and how distributors were adjusting their systems.
Exhibit 13. The Grid Crisis The Night Of February 15th SOURCE: ERCOT
During the webinar there was extensive discussion about the issue of critical facilities and the problems they experienced. There were multiple issues, but hopefully solutions can be designed that do not require major efforts or expense. As reported by The Houston Chronicle, many of operators of these critical facilities, especially power generators and natural gas processing plants and pipelines, were unaware of the short form (pictured) that needs to be filled out so they can be identified and protected.
Exhibit 14. What It Takes To Become A Critical Facility SOURCE: ERCOT
Another point about critical facilities is that Texas power distribution circuits are too large. Mrs. Silverstein believes they need to be rewired into smaller pods and, in some cases, provided with multiple connection options that increase the distribution company’s flexibility when instituting rolling blackouts to minimize their duration. Smaller circuits would also ensure that critical facilities can be kept online. None of the people involved in the discussion were sure how difficult a job this would be, but it seems it should be possible. Calling electrical engineers!
There was also a discussion about the use of smart meters as a way of controlling the load. These are the upgraded electricity meters that ratepayers are being charged for to improve the operation of the grid. Doubts were expressed about the ability of these meters to be controlled remotely – if turned off, can they be turned back on remotely? Does the technology of the 2009 generation smart meters enable them to be controlled properly? Addressing many of these issues will become engineering challenges, but presumably they will not involve large capital investments, or take too long to complete. Installing backup power with onsite fuel supplies at critical facilities would seem to be another relatively easy solution. This was proposed as a solution for ensuring that the electric-powered compressors that replaced gas-powered compressors would continue to operate. The switch to electric-powered compressors on pipelines has been done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it seems the switches were done without considering “what ifs?”
As we have written since the blackout, we need much more data about what happened on the grid and with electricity generators and fuel suppliers during the entire storm’s duration. Presently, we only have gross natural gas production data or estimates from models. The best data model from RBN Energy shows a production drop and rebound before the storm arrived, which then dropped sharply as the Valentine’s Day storm developed. Therefore, we need more data about which producers experienced outages and why. Assembling that detailed production data will take a while.
Exhibit 15. Gas Production In Texas During The Storm SOURCE: RBN Energy
The sooner we can get the needed data cited during the webinar and analyze it, the quicker we can develop solutions to the fundamental issues that contributed to the blackout. The recent increase in the Texas death toll to 111 due to the winter storm and blackout should motivate officials to get the data and develop solutions. The revised death toll is a reminder that more people die from cold weather than die from heat waves. That reality has been known for years and was recently confirmed in a 2014 study by the National Center for Health Statistics of U.S. deaths for 2006-2010 due to weather events. Without the detailed data, we cannot answer why the blackout happened and how to prevent its repetition. That means addressing our fuel mix, operational conditions, identifying and protecting critical facilities, and always providing adequate generating capacity. We hope this is the highest priority in Austin, but we are not optimistic.