Bloomberg
Blackouts Cascade Beyond Texas in Deepening Power Crisis
Javier Blas, Brian K. Sullivan and Naureen S. Malik 1 hr ago
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Blackouts Cascade Beyond Texas in Deepening Power Crisis
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(Bloomberg) -- Blackouts trigged 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.
a man riding a snowboard down a snow covered slope: People cross the street as snow falls in North Bergen, New Jersey on February 7, 2021.© Photographer: KENA BETANCUR/AFP People cross the street as snow falls in North Bergen, New Jersey on February 7, 2021.
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.
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.
“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.