It’s Cold In Texas, But No Reason To Expect Grid Failure

As some in our state and national news media seem to be actively hoping for another grid failure, those of us who live in Texas really aren’t all that worried about it despite some cold weather setting in this week. Oh, we know our grid remains unstable and not especially reliable, but the cold snap we are seeing this week is nothing unusual, and certainly does not compare to the massive winter storm that caused the grid to fail on Valentine’s Day a year ago.

While Texas government officials most certainly did not do everything needed to ensure grid stability going forward over the past year, they do appear to have mandated enough weatherization and other improvements to avoid a massive failure during a pretty normal winter weather event we are going to experience in the coming 4-5 days. Not only is a 25 degree low temperature in Fort Worth like we saw Thursday morning not unusual this time of year, it’s also a dry cold. While a few isolated counties in parts of the state have been warned to expect some sleet and maybe even a few snow flurries, North Texas will not be covered in a sheet of ice and snow as it was for days last February.

It is that ice as much as the cold temperatures that causes wind turbines and natural gas delivery systems to freeze up. It’s that ice and snow cover that causes solar arrays to stop producing power even in the middle of the day. We aren’t having that, and so it is a bit of a mystery why Bloomberg decided to run with a story Thursday titled “Texas Braces For Cold, Sleet And a Test For The Power Grid.”

That story starts by stating “A blast of frigid air threatens to bring slick and cold conditions across southern Texas, triggering a winter storm watch and raising concerns for power grid operators and natural gas drillers.” Yet, the low temperature forecast for Corpus Christi Friday morning is 33 degrees; for Laredo, the forecast low is 34 degrees. Not even freezing.

Again, the Texas grid is far from perfect and I’ve written extensively about that over the past 11 months, but I’m thinking it is probably going to manage to persevere through this. God help every Republican officeholder in Texas if it doesn’t.

Bloomberg, of course, is the same media outlet that produced a report in early January in which it claimed that the natural gas delivery system in Texas came close to failing during a cold snap at the first of the year, saying “nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas was burned or wasted due to weather-related shutdowns.” Even after regulators at the Railroad Commission and grid managers at ERCOT corrected the record with official data, Bloomberg did not correct this story, and Texas media outlets like the Houston Chronicle and the Texas Tribune continued to expand off it with stories of their own using the same erroneous data.

All of this seems just a continuation of the focused campaign within the media to attempt to blame last year’s grid failure solely on the natural gas system, as a means of exonerating their favored renewables from any role. Which helps to explain why, when the Baker Institute at Rice University published a terrific set of graphics based on real, actual ERCOT data that shows conclusively that wind and solar were the first power sources to start dropping off the grid on Feb. 9 last year, it was almost studiously ignored by these same media outlets.

Texans know their grid is not stable, and that more work needs to be done to truly fix it. Thousands upon thousands of us spent the last year reinforcing our homes with solar and natural gas backup generation to protect against another massive failure, because nobody truly has faith in the state’s officials to really fix it, despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s “guarantee” that the grid will not fail this winter.

But few of us are actually worried about any catastrophic failure happening during this current cold snap. Most Texans have only seen winter events like last February’s Winter Storm Uri 2-3 times in their lifetimes. We see weekends like this coming one 2-3 times every winter.

All this leering media coverage appearing to actively hope for another disaster is just unseemly, and really ought to stop. Maybe wait for an actual problem to pop up, and then report on that.