“And how much time do we have left?”
Things in Texas seem to be looking up a little bit now. The temperature is warming back up around the country as the polar vortex moves on. My uncle, who actually lives in Texas, says they have water back on again, but it’s under a boil order. I’m glad that they’re doing alright. The blackouts are continuing in some areas, I think, and the government there has issued statements regarding the absolutely absurd prices of electricity in the wake of the demand surge. Things are still pretty bad, but they’re clearing up, I guess. If you’re reading this and you have no idea what I’m talking about, maybe you’ve missed the news for the past week or so, but basically Texas’s power grid lost a sizeable chunk of its production capacity due to freezing weather, coinciding with a spike in demand due to that same freezing weather since, you know, people want to be able to heat their homes when it gets cold. So in order to protect the grid’s infrastructure from significant damage caused by huge demand and low production, the state imposed blackouts in different regions. And this has caused people to be without power, and sometimes even water, for three or four days or more in sub-freezing temperatures. The whole thing has been a colossal failure not just on the energy sector but on the Texas government as a whole. People have died because of this. But here’s the thing; this probably isn’t going to be an isolated event in the near future.
Alright, here’s the thing; I don’t want to rehash old news or well-trodden paths. There’s already dozens of articles and posts and think pieces about what this crisis means for the future of the country, in terms of climate change, in terms of energy production, and in terms of resource allocation, among others. There’s all sorts of posts about these exact topics, so it would be bit repetitive on my part to write another piece that’s just kind of an overview on all of this. But, that’s kind of still what I’m going to do. Because as an environmental scientist, I feel like I need to say something about what’s happening in Texas, because it’s so intrinsic to the future of our country, our world, and energy consumption. Because, if you couldn’t has guessed already from my background, I believe that this thing happening in Texas is a symptom of a much larger problem; this country’s lack of preparation for climate change and a future of weather extremes.
First things first, though; Texas is experiencing a humanitarian crisis, and my heart goes out to all of those affected by this. Living without power in the bitter cold for an unknown length of time sounds absolutely terrifying, and I wish for the power grid to be back up to snuff as soon as possible. It is a tragedy that this crisis has resulted in the death of innocent people, and I wish to send my condolences to their families. This should never have happened, and it is a shame that it did. But I’d like to explore why it all happened, and what it means for the future.
In a nutshell, the Texas power grid collapsed under a combination of frozen production, surging demand, and weird isolationist policy. Actually, that’s something I want to get out of the way first; part of this disaster was directly caused by the fact that Texas has refused, for decades now, to connect their power grid to the rest of the United States. And despite producing more power than any other state, they still went dark. Part of the reason that other states nearby were unable to help, and part of the reason it was just Texas and not other southern states (though some central and northern plains states saw blackouts as well), is because of the fact that Texas’s power grid is entirely isolated. In order to avoid federal oversight, they isolated their grid decades ago and have largely left it to market forces. I’m personally very much against this sort of decoupling, market-driven process in any sort of utility sector, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this policy of quasi-isolationism has indirectly lead to grid shutdown and skyrocketing prices. But that’s really just a small part of the problem, overall.
The primary driver behind all of this was, of course, a freak weather event. It got really, really cold down in Texas, dropping temperature and piling up snow that hasn’t been seen at these levels for decades, but the reason it got so cold is because, basically, the Arctic Circle got wobbly. Normally, there’s a huge mass of cold air in the Arctic that’s kept in place by the polar jet stream, an atmospheric belt of wind. But this year the Arctic experienced a warming event known as Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW), which warmed things up for a bit. This caused the jet stream to get weaker, since the jet stream is powered by the difference in temperature between the equator and the poles. So, less difference, less jet stream. Mind you, the SSW is a natural event that happens every couple of years, and it’s entirely within natural variability to occur, but this was different because of how extreme it was. The jet stream got wobbly and let some cold Arctic air out of the freezer, and it got all the way down to Texas. That… isn’t supposed to happen.
Fun fact, did you know that the Arctic circle is warming at a rate three times that the rest of the globe, due to climate change? And isn’t it fun that, like I explained above, warming the Arctic (whether it’s the SSW or something else) weakens the jet stream and lets the cold air out? I don’t think it’s rocket science to put two and two together and reach the conclusion that we could see the jet stream weakening and more extreme cold snaps becoming more common in the future. And very likely more extreme. We see it all the time; more extreme heat waves, more extreme cold snaps, bigger wildfires and more unpredictable hurricane seasons. You can’t tie the individual events to climate change directly, but there’s a pretty strong trend here. Things are getting more common and a whole lot worse, on average. It might seem funny that climate change made Texas freeze, but as reductive as that statement is, it’s got a little bit of truth.
So it got really cold in Texas, and it’s kind of our fault. But why did all the energy production fail? What caused Texas to suddenly lose 45 gigawatts of energy production at the least convenient time? Well, almost none of their energy production systems were winterized. It seems obvious, of course; why would Texas need to winterize their systems? It’s expensive and time consuming and Texas is warm, anyway. Well, here you go. This is why. Natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear, wind, and solar; they all failed, in varying degrees. Pipes burst. Coolant tanks shuttered. Rotors locked up. It doesn’t matter the exact mechanism behind the failure, because they were all roughly the same; Texas systems weren’t built for extreme cold. You can run all those systems in sub-zero temperatures, sure. Just the other day, when the storm was at its worst, the wind turbines in Illinois were just fine. And Canada and Greenland and Germany all have pretty substantial renewable energy systems that work great under cold weather. But Texas didn’t winterize them, even though climatologists knew in advance that it was going to be a cold year, and that we should all expect more cold snaps. And so the system fell apart.
There’s a lot of talk going around in conservative circles, including Texas’s governor and other major officials, that wind and solar are entirely to blame for this catastrophe, or at least mostly to blame. That the renewables just couldn’t stand to the stress test. But here’s the thing; that’s bullshit. Sure, wind and solar failures were responsible for 10 to 18 gigawatts of lost production, but the rest of that 45 or so gigawatt loss was from natural gas, coal, and oil. Picking on one over the other is an absurd idea. No one stood the stress test, at least in Texas. It doesn’t make any damn sense to blame wind power and conveniently ignore the major failures of the natural gas infrastructure, too. But there’s this rallying cry for the removal of renewable energies from the Texas grid and the reinstallation of gas, coal, and oil. Not that they went anywhere, anyway, since renewables only make up about 10% of Texas’s grid. But even if wind and solar were the problem, even playing devil’s advocate and assuming that, yes, renewable energy caused the entire infrastructure failure in Texas, going all-in on fossil fuels still doesn’t make a lick of sense.
I always get so confused when people tell me we need to update the fossil fuel infrastructure and boost the energy output of oil, gas, coal, whatever you poison of choice is. Because even if you don’t believe in climate change, and even if you don’t believe that the burning of those fuels is very slowly turning our planet into an unstable mess that could very well destroy society, we’re running out of fossil fuels. They can’t possibly last forever. You can reinvest now, sure, build more gas plants and more efficient coal plants, but you’re running on borrowed time. Estimate put us at somewhere between 50 and 90 years until we run out of fossil fuels. What the hell are we going to do then? You can throw all the money in Texas at new gas plants and oil refineries, even update them with winterization to make sure this doesn’t happen again, but you’ve got a century at best before they’re all worthless. Your new pipelines aren’t worth shit when there’s nothing to pipe through them. What’ll happen then?
Sure, maybe someone will dig up new deposits of oil and gas, or maybe we’ll build tech that makes them super-efficient, but the point still stands that you’re just buying time. And while there is some value in natural gas as a backup source of heat in the event that large-scale wind or solar farms fail, and while there’s an argument to be made for oil and coal in a transitional use format between now and the future, and while there’s an argument to be made that the energy storage for wind and solar is preposterously expensive right now, those are issues we can fix. In the same way that we could optimize natural gas to make it last 200 years, we could, instead, optimize wind power and grid-scale batteries so that, I don’t know, we can collect free energy from the wind for thousands of years and store it forever. You want energy independence from the middle east or Russia? Renewables. You want cheaper production costs for everything from paper to cars? Renewables. You want your grandchildren to have electricity instead of burning candles when they’re your age like some sort of medieval monk? Renewables. You don’t even have to come at it from a standpoint of climate change, or even have to believe in climate change at all, to see that renewables are the best long-term investment. Anything else isn’t going to help if you want this country to make it to 2121. And I think that everything happening in Texas is a great example of why. We, as a country, aren’t planning for the future. We aren’t planning for an unstable world, an unpredictable space of reckless weather and diminishing returns on investment. We’re planning for a world that’s long since past, and disasters like this are the consequences. We need to look ahead.
Transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewables, and adapting to a world under climate change, is a necessary step. It’ll take a lot of time and money to do, but if Texas has taught us anything, it’s that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I think, despite what the government in Texas is saying, that now more than ever is the time to invest in renewable resources, in things like solar and wind, and building them in a way that’s resilient to unexpected events like this one. We’re only going to see more of them, and something has to happen. Hell, I don’t care if it requires a transition period; while I’d love to see a five-year shift away from fossil fuels like in the Green New Deal or something, I don’t mind if it takes a couple decades to go all-renewable. Believe it or not, I like nuclear power; I think it’s a great stepping stone from short-lived nonrenewable fossil fuels to a long-term renewable energy production future. I’d rather not see it become a permanent fixture of our energy landscape, since it’s technically also a nonrenewable resource like coal or oil, and the waste it produces isn’t fun, but I think a future with all renewables and then mini nuclear reactors as emergency backup generators is a future worth living in.
Texas is going to be reeling from the events of this last week for months, maybe years, to come, and I hope that this never happens again. But despite all the nonsense wind and solar being the problem, the issue was the entire infrastructure, not one or two parts of it. Texas, and this entire country, and this entire world, needs an infrastructure update if it’s going to succeed in a climate changed future. Because while this freak storm isn’t necessarily directly climate change, climate change is going to make things like this a lot more destructive and a lot more common. Texas needs to do something about their grid to stop this from happening again, but the rest of the country, and the world, needs to pay attention. I feel like this is a sort of turning point, and how we react to these challenges now will determine how we survive in the future. Now is the time for change. Let’s make the long-term investment, and not the investment that’ll run out by the end of the century.
Everyone who has been affected by this storm, both in Texas and beyond, I hope that you’re all doing ok. And that goes for everyone out there right now, affected by COVID-19 or any of the other crises hitting our country one after the other. I hope you’re all safe. And if you’re not, I hope you manage to be safe soon. Good luck. We can get through this together.
