Blackouts Cascade Beyond Texas in Deepening Power Crisis

 

Blackouts triggered by frigid weather are spreading across the central U.S. and into Mexico as an energy crisis that’s already brought Texas’s power grid to its knees deepens.

As more than 2 million homes in Texas are already without power, the operator of an grid spanning 14 states from North Dakota to Oklahoma ordered utilities to start rotating outages to protect the system from failing amid surging demand for electricity. The outages have also spread into Mexico.

“In our history as a grid operator, this is an unprecedented event,” the grid operator, called the Southwest Power Pool, said in a statement Monday.

The brutal cold striking Texas -- ironically the capital of the U.S. energy industry and home of some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies -- is emblematic of a world facing more unpredictable weather due to the rising impact of climate change. The outages underscore how as the globe moves away from fossil fuels into an all-electrified system that relies more and more on renewable energy, the grid becomes more vulnerable too.

(How long are we going to wait to realize that we need get rid of centralized grids and pipelines? Isn't time to move to the decentralized distributed autonomous energy?)

Such weather conditions are very rare in much of Texas, and they have unleashed chaos on the ground. In Houston, the state’s largest city, roads are iced over and there are long lines to refill household propane canisters. Firewood is selling out.

Besides the human impact, the cold is wreaking havoc on the energy industry itself. Oil production in the Permian has dropped by 1 million barrels a day, helping U.S. crude prices to trade above $60 a barrel for the first time in more than year. The region’s industrial plants built to cope torrid summers rather than arctic weather, and the biggest U.S. oil refinery went offline on Monday, reducing the supply of gasoline and other fuels.

Large swaths of Dallas, Houston and other cities have been plunged into darkness as extreme cold and surging demand for heat pushes generators to the brink. The outages began as controlled, rolling power cuts but have cascaded into prolonged blackouts in some areas.

(If we wouldn't rely on the centralized grid and the pipe with gas, that wouldn't happen. Even if energy would be lost in some places, those would be localized and not cause a cascade effect!)

“We anticipate we will need to continue these controlled outages for the rest of today and perhaps all day tomorrow,” Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which managed the state’s power grid, said during a briefing Monday.

In Mexico, at least 400,000 homes, businesses and other users lost power as the cold in Texas triggered a natural gas shortage and forced power plants offline. About 60% of those impacted had their power restored by midday, according to the grid operator, Cenace.

In the last six months, extreme temperatures have led to rolling blackouts in the two most populous U.S. states. In August, California grid operators shut off power when record heat push demand beyond capacity, and now Texas’ record cold has led to the same result.

The extreme cold appears to have caught Texas’s highly decentralized electricity market by surprise. Power plants with a combined capacity of more than 34 gigawatts were forced offline overnight, including nuclear reactors, coal and gas generators and wind farms, Woodfin said. It’s not clear why, he added.

Wind power in particular appears to have been a major victim of the weather conditions, with turbine blades rendered inoperable due to ice, a phenomenon that reduces efficiency can ultimately stop them from spinning. Wind generation has more than halved to 4.2 gigawatts.

(Usually birds and bats are the victims of wind turbines. Wind power must be a victim, as icing presents a danger for equipment and people. Moreover, even short operation with iced blades will require their replacement if not immediately, but much sooner than it would be needed otherwise, completely cancelling the promise of wind turbine efficiency. This is of course the most serious concern for large grid-connected wind farms.)

Power is going to continue to be cut across the state through Monday and potentially into Tuesday morning until enough generators come back online, Woodfin said.

“Every grid operator and every electric company is fighting to restore power right now,” said Bill Magness, head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs the state’s grid.

These are the first rolling blackouts caused by cold weather since 2011 in Texas. Spikes in electricity demand usually happen in summer in Texas when air conditioning use rises. A loss of frequency on the grid has caused 30 gigawatts of generation to halt. Many stations will have been undergoing scheduled maintenance, leaving the grid more exposed during unusually large spikes in demand.

Parts of Texas were colder than Alaska, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature at 5 a.m. in Houston was 18 degrees Fahrenheit (-7.8 degrees Celsius), matching the reading in Anchorage. In the Dallas-Fort Worth area it was 5 degrees Fahrenheit (-15 degrees Celsius).

Frigid temperatures and a parade of storms in the U.S. follow other instances of extreme winter weather this year that have snarled ports and upended energy markets in Asia and Europe. Texas, which isn’t accustomed to winter’s full fury, is getting a big taste. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency, mobilizing federal assistance to aid local response efforts.

Power crunch

The average spot price for power across the Texas grid hit the state’s $9,000 per megawatt-hour price cap shortly after 9:30 a.m. local time. LNG exports from the U.S. also plummeted after the freeze shut ports and wells, and oil production also took a hit, with Permian oil production plunging by as much as one million barrels a day. West Texas Intermediate futures rose by as much as 2.5%, above $60 a barrel for the first time in more than a year.

The cut to crude supplies is threatening to unleash a rush for everything from propane to heating oil, fuels that are used in mobile heating devices.

Odessa in West Texas, one of the largest cities in the Permian Basin, still has power, but San Antonio has lost power with rolling blackouts lasting 10-15 minutes, according to sources on the ground.

Houston may pick up as much as 2 inches (5 centimeters) of snow overnight, along with ice and sleet, the National Weather Service said. It will get hit by another storm bringing ice and freezing rain Wednesday.

“It is going to be a cold week,” said David Roth, a senior branch forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center. “The southern plains are in a cold pattern and it is going to take a while for them to break out of it.”

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Autonomous on-site energy generation and storage is clearly a way out of this kind of crises which are going to be more frequent and more severe with the global climate change that is happening.

Original source: bloomberg.com (highlighted text is mine)

What's the Worst That Could Happen?

    On September 2nd 1859 C.F. Herbert, prospecting for gold in south-eastern Australia, saw something sublime in the evening sky. “A scene of almost unspeakable beauty presented itself, lights of every imaginable colour were issuing from the southern heavens,” he would later recall. “The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it a foreshadowing of Armageddon and final dissolution".

    Those who saw cataclysm  in the auroral display were not exactly wrong: just ahead of their time. The Carrington event, as the geomagnetic storm Herbert observed came to be known, was the result of 100 megatonnes of charged particles thrown off by the Sun a few hours earlier slamming into Earth's magnetosphere, a protective magnetic sheath generated by currents in the planet's liquid core. The electromagnetic effects of the onslaught did not just produce  a truly spectacular display of the Southern Lights (and the Northern ones, too, visible as far south as Colombia). They induced powerful currents in any electrical conductors to hand. Some telegraph networks took on a life of their own!..

    Such effects mattered little at the time light bulb was 20 years inn the future. In today's ubiquitously, fundamentally and increasingly electrified world a "coronal mass ejection" (CME) as large as that of the Carrington event could cause all kinds of chaos. Induced currents would topple electrical grids. Satellites would have their circuitry fried and possibly be dragged by the outer atmosphere bloated by the storm's energy. A slight foretaste of what might come we had in 1989 when Quebec's grid was knocked out by a storm many hundreds times less in severity than the Carrington event.

    When the next big one comes is hard to predict but that it will eventually come is beyond the debate. Solar physicists put the odds of a Carrington level geomagnetic storm some time in the next ten years at around one in ten (!) 

    The most devastating effect of a really large CME would be on the transformers in electrical grids: gigantic, purpose-built machines that step voltage down between the long-range transmission grid and the distribution grid which runs lower-voltage power into homes, businesses and hospitals. Strong enough induced currents will damage those transformers beyond repair. Because it typically takes between six and 12 months to get a replacement transformer made - and only a few countries have the industrial capacity to make them - that could have many grids crippled for a long time. "If you simultaneously lose the ability to pump water, to pump fuel, to communicate and lose eyes in the sky, yu pretty quickly get into territory that's never really been explored before", says Dan Baker, the director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

    Geomagnetic storms, as devastating as they could be. are only a subset of all events found in the historical and geological record that present plausible threat s of catastrophe. Giant volcanic eruptions, powerful earthquakes, tsunamis and really strong hurricanes are just some examples of others. Frequency and magnitude of disastrous events shows a tendency to increase.

   

                        Credit: Swiss Re/Cat Perils and Swiss Re Institute   

Everything in our modern world relies on energy, mostly electricity. Just because we came to depend heavily, or rather critically, on the power grids providing energy, any of such events would leave many thousands, potentially millions, of people without energy, water, food and communication for extended period of time, leading to many lives lost and causing huge economic damage. Does it have to be that way? Can it be done differently? Yes, with distributed energy generation.

Clean energy can be produced where is needed, without the need to transmit it across countries and continents. This would minimize the footprint, eliminate huge inefficiencies, dramatically increase reliability and avoid a domino effect of failing power grids.

Moreover, the energy generation and storage system does not have to be permanently attached to one location. Meet the Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES) developed by Ascent Systems Technologies.

AMES is a self-contained module that fits into a standard shipping container and can be delivered on demand to any geographical location in the world. Rapidly deployed, it provides an uninterrupted source of clean energy without requiring any fuel supply or connection to the power grid. AMES combines several advanced technologies in one integrated and seamlessly operating system. The brain of the module is Ascent's proprietary configuration and adaptive control software combining model-predictive approach with a novel machine learning technique.

The module will be invaluable in situations such as disaster relief efforts and humanitarian missions. It can also serve remote communities, mining operations, research stations, field hospitals and many other applications providing critical energy security while protecting the environment. Multiple modules deployed in the area or even at different geographical locations are connected via smart network for environment monitoring and continuous performance optimization. Welcome to the future of energy!