Texas is now on its fourth day of blackouts after a freakish winter storm left Austin colder than Anchorage, causing millions to lose power and access to clean water as farm animals took up residence in people’s living rooms to keep from freezing to death.
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The disaster would have already been difficult to process for those of us not acquainted with Texas’ eccentric energy infrastructure. But its immediate assimilation into a broader “culture war narrative,” as my colleague Charlie Warzel put it, has created even more confusion around what — and who — is truly to blame.

To what extent is this a story about climate change or just run-of-the-mill American political dysfunction? And what lessons should Texas, if not the country, be taking away from this? Here’s what journalists and experts are saying.
Were frozen wind turbines the main culprit?

No. The idea that the increasing prevalence of renewable energy is responsible for Texas’ ills is now a popular talking point on the right: As Tucker Carlson said on Monday on one of the most-watched cable news shows in America, “The windmills froze, so the power grid failed.”

But most of the power loss in Texas came from natural gas suppliers. Some wind turbines did in fact freeze, but the state was counting on wind power for only a small fraction — estimates circle around 7 percent to 11 percent — of its energy mix this winter. “The performance of wind and solar is way down the list among the smaller factors in the disaster that we’re facing,” Daniel Cohan, a professor of environmental engineering at Rice University, told Bloomberg. Blaming renewables for the blackouts, he said, “is really a red herring.”

So what actually happened? As Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor and energy systems engineer at Princeton University, explains in The Times, Texas has a unique electric grid that operates independently from the rest of the country to avoid federal regulation, so it has a very limited ability to draw power from other regions. And unlike the rest of the United States and Canada, Texas doesn’t pay electricity producers to hold reserves of at least 15 percent beyond typical daily demand.

Both of these features made Texas’ electricity system uniquely vulnerable to failure:

The state had anticipated that in the worst-case scenario, it would use no more than 67 gigawatts — or 67 billion watts — of electricity during the winter peak. But by Sunday evening, power demand — fueled by the use of inefficient electric heaters — had surged past that level.
At the same time, and for the same reasons, the state’s supply of power shrank: Natural gas was being siphoned from power plants for heat as icy conditions damaged the electric grid, causing parts of it to trip offline.

“In essence,” The Times’s Brad Plumer reports, “an electric grid optimized to deliver huge quantities of power on the hottest days of the year was caught unprepared when temperatures plummeted.”
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Did climate change cause this?

Scientists aren’t quite sure. They know, of course, that climate change causes extreme weather events to become more frequent and more intense. But the science of attributing individual events to climate change is a nascent one, and it can take many months to reach something approaching an answer.

There also isn’t yet a firm consensus about whether climate change fuels individual winter storms, even as it renders winters milder in the aggregate. In a 2019 study, the climatologist Jennifer Francis found that winter storms increased sharply between 2008 and 2018 as the Arctic warmed faster than the rest of the planet.

But some experts caution that a clear causal link hasn’t been established. Going back further to 1958, Amy Butler, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory, told The Times she has yet to find any longer-term trend in polar vortex disruptions — the cause of this week’s storm — which “occur naturally even in the absence of climate change.”
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Francis’ team disagrees. “This can’t be hand-waved away as if it’s entirely natural,” Judah Cohen, one of Francis’ co-authors, told The Guardian. “This is happening not in spite of climate change; it’s in part due to climate change.” Such counterintuitive effects are one reason the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe uses the phrase “global weirding.”

Or, to borrow another metaphor, the climate is drunk. “This extreme polar vortex event epitomizes everything climate change is: unprecedented, unrelenting, affecting a population unaccustomed and unprepared,” the reporter Emily Atkin writes in her newsletter “Heated.” “Yes, we have always had winter — but not here, and not like this. Now take out the word ‘winter,’ and replace it with every other extreme weather event. That’s climate change.”

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Frigid Weather and Global Warming
Could Texas have prevented this?

On Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott called for an emergency review of the Texas grid operator, promising to work with the legislature to ensure the state “never experiences power outages like this again.” (Senator Ted Cruz was busy getting ready to jet off to Cancún, Mexico.)

But as extreme weather intensifies, some experts aren’t sure that goal is possible. “We need to recognize that there will be some types of events that are too expensive to design around,” Emily Grubert, an environmental engineer at Georgia Tech, told Quartz. “We need to think about this from a justice perspective, and make sure people aren’t dying because they don’t have access to energy.”
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Still, there are undoubtedly improvements that could be made, Jenkins argues. Wind turbines can be equipped with heaters (they work in Antarctica, after all), gas plants can be built to store oil on-site, pipelines can be insulated and grid regulators can incentivize producers to keep deeper power reserves in case of emergencies. All of this is already done in different regions of the country.

Jenkins is also among the many who believe it’s time to rethink Texas’ independence from the rest of the country’s power systems. “Generally, with grids, the bigger and more interconnected they are, the more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective they are,” David Roberts writes in his newsletter “Volts.”

But Texas has been here before. Just a decade ago, The Texas Tribune reports, the state experienced a smaller winter storm that triggered rolling blackouts affecting 3.2 million people. In a report on the failure, federal regulators warned that the state needed to winterize its grid, but the recommendations appear to have gone largely unheeded because of political inertia and, crucially, an aversion to expense.

“We need to have a conversation about if we believe that we’re going to have more weather events like this,” Josh Rhodes, a research associate at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, told The Tribune. “On some level, it comes down to if you want a more resilient grid, we can build it, it will just cost more money. What are you willing to pay?”
Texas today, another state tomorrow?

When it comes to America’s electrical infrastructure, Texas is only the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg: Most of the country’s electric transmission and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s or 1960s and have a 50-year life expectancy, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the nation’s energy infrastructure a grade of D+. (While Texas suffered the worst effects of this week’s storm, hundreds of thousands of people in Oregon and Virginia also lost power.) Simply maintaining that existing infrastructure would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, Rhodes says.

And that’s before climate change is factored in. Intensifying heat waves, water shortages, hurricanes, fires and floods are creating new risks for electricity systems all across the country, as Californians who have experienced fatal fires sparked by their state’s criminally negligent utility well know. One recent study found that the Southeast alone may need 35 percent more electric capacity by 2050 just to deal with the strain climate change is expected to cause.

“One of the hardest things about dealing with climate change is that our modern infrastructure was built with historical weather conditions in mind,” Plumer and Hiroko Tabuchi write. “But, of course, those conditions are now changing rapidly, and the past is no longer a good guide to the future.”

President Biden has promised to mitigate the costs of climate change by moving the country’s grid off fossil fuels by 2035, but that would take $4.5 trillion, or just under $2 trillion less than what the country has spent on the war on terror, according to the consulting firm Wood MacKenzie.

“This is going to be a significant challenge,” Grubert told The Times. “We need to decarbonize our power systems so that climate change doesn’t keep getting worse, but we also need to adapt to changing conditions at the same time. And the latter alone is going to be very costly. We can already see that the systems we have today aren’t handling this very well.”
The New York Times
Me: Texas is where the Trump followers are – Hope you are enjoying your big freeze, think of Trump – he is nice and warm where he i