Texas-Style Blackouts Are the Future

The grid is designed to shut down, and we’re designing it to shut down more often.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"In covering this week’s Texas outages, the Economist magazine couldn’t decide whether the world’s “climate crisis” or “America’s infrastructure crisis” was the right headline. The reality is more prosaic. Significant freezing episodes led to blackouts at least seven times from 1983 to 2011. In Texas, politicians, utility executives and citizens have repeatedly been asked by nature: Do you want to winterize your grid against rare winter outages or do you prefer lower rates? Lower rates kept winning, at least till now."

"The conversation people need to have begins elsewhere: Americans want reliability from their grid, yes—and low prices, reduced emissions and no unsightly infrastructure. These wants are in tension.

In Texas, every kind of power source suffered a variety of mechanical malfunctions due to an extraordinary icing episode, with wind power taking the worst hit by percentage. In the Northeast, the perennial challenge is trees that neighbors are reluctant to see cut down. But you only have to dig a quarter-inch into the reliability literature to see that, while weather is always with us, and while “major events” will tend to steal the show, renewable intermittency is the new systematic challenge to grid reliability. Renewables are a puzzle both directly and indirectly because they suck up investible resources that might be used for other purposes."

"Power lines are unwelcome. Solar arrays and wind farms are not everybody’s idea of pretty and so must be located in unpopulated areas. Batteries can’t yet cure an intermittency problem, leaving only conventional plants. Coal is the worst of greenhouse offenders, gas is better and yet still opposed by greens, and forget about nuclear.

Texans had a rough week, say it again, because of an outlier cold snap that its system was designed to handle by shutting down. Temperatures are headed back into the 50s and 60s this weekend. You, me and everyone else live in utility districts where certain emergencies, such as those caused by trees on power lines or wildfires, are also designed to be handled by systems shutting down. We live with this.

But I doubt many people will be phlegmatic when Texas-like rolling blackouts come to the Northeast or New England one of these winters, as they almost did in the 2014 polar vortex. Falling trees won’t be the culprit. The guilty party will be our choice not to invest in pipelines and backup gas plants to support our desired renewables in the face of cold spells a lot more predictable than those that landed on Texas."