Texas power outage
A national electric-industry group developed winterization guidelines for operators to follow, but they are strictly voluntary and also require expensive investments in equipment and other necessary measures. The issue arose in Texas after a 2011 freeze that also led to power-plant shutdowns and blackouts. WHY WASN'T THE STATE PREPARED? Gas-fired plants and wind turbines can be protected against winter weather _ it's done routinely in colder, northern states.
He added he had been told by generators that they were doing everything possible to provide power. "We can't speculate on people's motivations in that way," said Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT. That raised questions whether some power generators who buy in the wholesale market may have had a profit motive to avoid buying more natural gas and simply shut down instead.
TEXAS POWER OUTAGE FULL
None of them were adequately weatherized or prepared for a full realm of weather and conditions." The staggering imbalance between Texas' energy supply and demand also caused prices to skyrocket from roughly $20 per megawatt hour to $9,000 per megawatt hour in the state's freewheeling wholesale power market. "Every one of them is vulnerable to extreme weather and climate events in different ways. "Every one of our sources of power supply underperformed," Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, tweeted.
TEXAS POWER OUTAGE OFFLINE
By Wednesday, 46,000 megawatts of power were offline statewide - 28,000 from natural gas, coal and nuclear plants and 18,000 from wind and solar, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state's power grid. But planning for this winter didn't imagine temperatures cold enough to freeze natural gas supply lines and stop wind turbines from spinning. The gap between the winter and summer supply reflects power plants going offline for maintenance during months when demand typically is less intense and there's not as much energy coming from wind and solar sources.
The state has a generating capacity of about 67,000 megawatts in the winter compared with a peak capacity of about 86,000 megawatts in the summer. Demand spiked to levels normally seen only on the hottest summer days, when millions of air conditioners run at full tilt. WHAT HAPPENED IN TEXAS? Plunging temperatures caused Texans to turn up their heaters, including many inefficient electric ones.