A Tale of Two Storms
On February 1st, 2023 I unexpectedly fell victim to the extensive power outages spreading across Austin, Texas, the result of a winter ice storm sweeping through the Hill Country. This storm, while relatively localized, decimated our power systems and left many without heating or lighting on some of the coldest days of winter. Ice from that storm toppled trees, covered roads, and encased power lines, causing mass chaos throughout the region. Sitting in my freezing bedroom surrounded by the light of a single candle, I couldn’t help but draw an uncomfortable connection to the devastating Winter Storm Uri of 2021, which gained national attention after it nearly collapsed the entire Texas electricity grid.
Nearly 70% of Texans lost power during Uri, some for days at a time and with only a few lucky enough to escape completely unscathed. This disaster left a strong impression on many Texans. Immediately following that storm we were so often told that an event like that would never be allowed to happen again. We were told that changes would be made to the electrical grid to prevent pains like those experienced during Uri. Yet almost two years later, Austinites were again without power. It’s not hard to imagine how some are beginning to see this as the new normal. Just as the west coast deals with seasonal wildfires, Texas will now be regularly afflicted by power-disrupting winter storms.
But it may come as a surprise that what caused these most recent power outages was not a repeat of what happened in 2021, even if the results were still a cold home and candle-lit evenings. During Winter Storm Uri, it was a combination of insufficient generation and excessive demand which disabled our grid. Yet throughout the 2023 storm, the grid covering most of Texas was taking things in stride. There was sufficient power generated throughout the state to keep all of our lights and heaters on, and plenty more at the ready in case of unexpected generation outages. This more recent storm caused havoc not by delivering a series of major blows to our generators, but by many small, localized hits to our delivery systems. Though both of these storms caused extensive loss of power, they highlighted two very different modes of failure for our grids, and two very different requirements for securing reliable electricity.
Blackouts and Blowouts
Broadly speaking, utility-scale electrical grids can be roughly divided into 3 elements: generation, transmission, and distribution. Generation is how we create electricity. For this, we use resources like solar panels or natural gas turbines. Transmission is how we take that created power and send it to where it is needed. The most recognizable features of this are the massive power lines we see along highways that deliver electricity to population centers. Distribution is essentially a shrunk-down version of transmission. It consists of many smaller lines and control systems designed to get energy from transmission lines into your home or office at just the right voltages and in the right quantity.
As you can imagine, electrical grids are massive machines, the largest humanity has ever built. Not only are there thousands of generators creating electricity at any moment, and millions of components like refrigerators or TVs (often called loads) consuming that electricity, but there are also countless components of an electrical highway connecting everything in between. Unfortunately, nearly every single component of this gigantic machine can be disturbed by weather. Even worse, a failure in one component can often cause a cascade of failures in the surrounding or dependent components. This is one of the reasons why the relationship between the grid and weather can be so complex. The electricity grid itself is infinitely complex and the weather has an impact at nearly every conceivable stage of its operation.
Despite this complexity, ensuring the continued functionality of our grids is essential. Although many of us are familiar with how we use energy to carry out work (making goods, powering our computers, moving our cars, etc.), many of us take for granted another important role of energy: controlling our environment. For all the talk on how adaptable humans are, it is interesting to think that a stable, controlled environment is one in which we can, generally, be more comfortable and do better work. And it is often this pursuit of comfort and stability that becomes one of the main drivers for our adaptations. The most recent winter storm, and nearly any other case of power loss, can provide anecdotal evidence of this. Significantly more complaints are heard on the news or the streets about the darkness and the cold in people’s homes than about their restricted ability to complete the day’s tasks. Although completing work was important, it was more important that any work could be completed in relative comfort and with convenience. We work to create better environments and in turn, those better environments allow us to do better work. This circular system is recognizable in our evolutions from using wood and biomass for energy, to now natural gas and electricity as major sources of power. Humans have steadily built and rebuilt these systems to control our environments, making them more resilient, reliable, and impactful over time. All to create better environments and eventually better work.
But despite the incredible progress we’ve made in controlling our environments, sometimes our systems still seem so fragile. Our computers crash, our cars break down, and apparently, our grids sometimes don’t deliver electricity. Some reasons for this are obvious. Natural gas generators without natural gas or solar panels without sun will not generate power. But even if we have a warm sunny day with all of our resources running at their maximum, our grids can still fail. If we are trying to consume too much power, perhaps by blasting our heaters on a cold winter day, an imbalance can occur between generation and consumption. If this balance is not re-established either by generating more power or reducing load, blackouts are sure to follow. Alternately, if too much electricity is being created and not enough of it is being consumed, maybe because a large load was rapidly disconnected, then the grid can experience equipment blowouts. This balancing and rebalancing of generation and load is happening constantly, often without notice, to keep our energy needs satisfied. However, this delicate balance is one that nature tends to sway unexpectedly. And when it does, nearly everyone begins to notice.
Winter Storm Uri
Winter Storm Uri was a prime example of nature radically upsetting this delicate equilibrium. During this event, there was a rapid and unexpected drop in available generation resources, primarily from natural gas facilities. This briefly left our grid in a state of critical imbalance, requiring an immediate disconnection of millions of loads to avoid a complete blackout. The power outages that many experienced during this time were a direct result of these grid-preserving measures. As the storm passed, generators could slowly be added back onto the grid, along with whatever loads they were capable of serving without disrupting the already precarious grid situation.
Post-Uri the governing bodies of Texas rallied to address problems of generation and demand balance as fast as they could. These changes were principally identified by the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT), the state agency responsible for managing utilities, and administrated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a nonprofit organization that operates the Texas grid on behalf of the state. Together, these organizations focused on solutions that would prevent and rectify future imbalances, particularly those caused by losses in generation during cold weather.
Enforced weatherization is perhaps the most basic solution they devised. Previously, generation owners were recommended to install insulation, heaters, and other equipment that would ‘weatherize’ facilities. Yet, up until Uri, there was no regulatory requirement for extensive weatherization. Operators were left to weatherize at their discretion, primarily incentivized by the high earnings that would be available to an operational facility during extreme weather events. Now, however, the PUCT has decided to enforce weatherization rather than just recommend it. This should prevent generators from being quickly disabled by unexpected weather circumstances while also improving their cold-weather performance.
One of the biggest issues identified by ERCOT and the PUCT was how interconnected our generation facilities are to the state’s natural gas suppliers. Although not explicitly planned and mapped out, many natural gas turbines rely on a continuous supply of natural gas piped in from producers. When the many wellheads that deliver gas froze one by one, the supply of fuel to natural gas generators was cut off. This extended the challenges of the grid back to the point of resource extraction. Thus, solutions had to be considered throughout this chain of natural gas supply as well to address issues of generation loss.
We are also gradually learning to extend our grid controls into the massive network of distribution systems. With extensive data collection and improved equipment at the consumption end of the grid, we can now manage how much energy we use and change this in response to unexpected generation fluctuations. This activity, known as demand response, can relieve the overloading of the grid and help to balance it from both the generation end and consumption end. Participants who volunteer for demand response programs have their electricity consumption reduced during emergencies in exchange for sizable compensation. In response to Uri, the PUCT expanded Texas’s industrial demand response program by adding an additional $25 million to the program’s budget, for a total of $75 million.
All of these solutions are aimed at improving grid health through generation and stability upgrades, which should make the grid more resilient in future winter storms. However, it’s unlikely that any of these improvements could have prevented the chaos caused by the recent 2023 storm. No matter how beneficial these improvements are in maintaining that critical balance between generation and consumption, they won’t help people receive electricity if generation and consumption become disconnected.
The New Storm
Remember, the grid is complex, with any number of failure points in-between generation and consumption. In the recent storm, an issue of delivery caused most of the failures rather than an imbalance between generation and consumption. Simply put, there were many small car accidents on the electric highway system that carries our power. Ice caused trees to sag, lowering them between or onto power lines. Water froze on lines, transformers, or other equipment leading them to malfunction or break. The list of potential failures is extensive. Of course, this all happened during Winter Storm Uri too. The impacts of generation and consumption simply overshadowed many of these delivery issues. However, any increase in the reliability of generation cannot stop a power outage if the means to deliver that power is disrupted. Ultimately, the disruptions observed in the recent storm were more akin to issues faced during other natural disasters, like tornados or hurricanes, rather than the result of fundamental oversights in Texas’s grid reliability. The problems caused by the destruction of transmission and distribution systems can only be resolved by creating more resilient and reliable systems, or by creating alternative methods of sending and delivering energy.
Similar to weatherizing generation assets, we can also weatherize transmission and distribution assets. Weatherizing generation assets is generally straightforward, as operators are often the sole steward of their assets. However, implementing improvements on transmission and distribution assets can be much more complicated. Each region or section of lines may be served or owned by a different organization. These organizations can be a company, a municipal grid operator, or often a non-profit co-op. In some regions, this can make any sweeping upgrades quite simple, like in the case of Austin Energy, which has a strong vertical integration of assets as the sole servicer of the Austin area grid. In other regions, like Houston and Dallas, broad market solutions can be difficult to implement where various retail energy providers compete to serve customers. Standard upgrades like insulating line equipment, improving vegetation management, and burying distribution lines are all possible, but they can also be costly and difficult to implement, especially if there is some dispute about who should be paying.
In addition to these conventional upgrades, many novel solutions are appearing as well that may improve consumer-end reliability. As you may have noticed, rooftop solar has begun to increase in popularity. This growth in at-home generation has initiated a fundamental shift in our electrical grids. No longer will electricity only be generated at centralized generation resources and then delivered by transmission and distribution in a top-down fashion, but now there will be a non-insignificant amount of generation available downstream within the distribution networks themselves. While this further increases the complexity of the grid, it does provide an opportunity to offer additional reliability during emergencies. Individuals with solar panels, batteries, and backup diesel generators could potentially energize their own homes as well as their neighbors’ homes. However, such upgrades can be expensive and time-consuming, particularly because much of the technology to enable this is still being developed and refined. There are also major disputes on how market structures and compensation should be managed for these novel developments. Nevertheless, bottom-up solutions can not only mitigate the impacts of winter storms but can also present an opportunity further evolve our modern electrical grids. These changes then become yet another addition to the circular system of better environments and better work.
While there is any number of infrastructure upgrades that could be made in pursuit of a more perfect grid or the next evolution of human environmental control, it must be advised that these will not come cheap. The question then becomes whether the benefits are immediate enough and sizable enough to justify any additional cost. Such an evaluation must be done at every level by every institution involved with the grid. However, in a budding city like Austin, with major corporations arriving nearly every year, distribution reliability is more valuable than ever. Unfortunately, if Austin and Austin Energy cannot provide companies and their employees with a reliable environment, they may consider going elsewhere. In other words, the cost of not pursuing these conventional and unconventional upgrades may have a detrimental effect on the city of Austin’s long-term health.
Humans & Environments
With this we find ourselves returning to the relationship between humans, energy, and weather. Humans, despite being incredibly adaptable, are often uncomfortable when forced into change. We dislike it when nature interrupts whatever delicate balance we have established. Just think of the disappointment we feel when watching the sea gradually swallow a carefully built sandcastle. We put work into creating our perfect environments, we value that work, and we value the work we expect ourselves to continue doing within that environment.
When nature interrupts that control, in this case via the electrical grid, not only does it inconvenience and upset us, but it can also severely harm those who are already dependent on those controlled environments. This could be an elderly woman relying on life-preserving machinery, or a struggling family now bundled under meager sheets at night. While we often pursue improvements to our environment for personal convenience, we gradually become reliant on these environments, leading to chaos when nature tears them down. As we continue to build up our environments, the stakes become higher. The impact of losing those environments becomes more costly both for our present and our future. Addressing the issues of grid reliability amid a winter storm is not just about creating immediate relief, but it is also about securing a predictable environment from which to build our future. Predictable environments are what humans have pursued for ages. And despite all of the back and forth about how to best achieve a predictable environment, it is something we will inevitably continue to create, one grid upgrade at a time.