- [Presenter] Texans are still reeling
from the power outage crisis earlier his year.
- [Paula] All the suffering,
and the terrible experience that people have
it's heart-wrenching
and we never want this to happen again.
- [Presenter] But many experts see what happened
as a sign of things to come
and not just in Texas.
- Let's use this as a huge example
of what we don't want
as a community,
as a nation.
- [Presenter] More on that in a minute.
First, Texas.
To unpack what happened here,
let's take things step by step.
First, freezing Arctic air
usually pinned way farther North
by a ring of rapid wind called the jet stream
made its way southward,
plunging much of North America into a deep freeze
that engulfed Texas.
- It was colder than normal for longer than normal
and it effected every single County in the state.
- There are some winters where we never hit freezing.
In this case, the challenge we had
was the consistency day after day after day,
no warming up,
no getting to above freezing.
- [Presenter] Texas is powered roughly half by natural gas,
20% by coal,
another 20% by wind and solar
and 10% by nuclear.
With summer temperatures regularly hitting 90 plus,
even a hundred plus degrees Fahrenheit,
Texans plan for heat.
The state doesn't design its power plants
and natural gas system to work in super cold conditions.
- [Paula] We are constantly
designing our plants to take heat off.
Ventilation,
exhaust systems.
There's a lot of cooling that happens with recycled water
and you're trying to keep that plant
and as cool as possible.
And then the North you'll find power plants
fully encased with a permanent structure,
brick, steel
all the things that they need,
they will also create permanent coverings
for those exposed lines.
And we just don't have that structure.
- [Presenter] Most power plants use heat
to drive turbines to create electricity.
Texas temporarily winterizes those plants each year
through insulation,
portable heaters, scaffolding
but when the bitterly cold weather
descended in mid February--
- A lot of the infrastructure for delivering
electricity just froze.
- [Presenter] Not just for delivering electricity,
but also the equipment for making electricity froze.
- [Michael ] We had freeze offs in the natural gas system
that actually froze at the wellhead and clogged the wellhead
or frozen the equipment
or in the gathering lines of pipelines.
We couldn't get the gas to the power plants.
We have four nuclear reactors in Texas,
one of them turned off because of a frozen water pump.
- [Presenter] A pump that'd usually helps circulate water.
Water that gets heated to form steam and drive the turbines.
- We have several coal plants
that turned off because of frozen equipment
at the coal plants
along with some snow on solar panels
and then some of the wind turbines had ice.
So we had outages throughout the system.
- [Presenter] These outages turned off electricity
in different parts of the state,
including sections of the natural gas system
that are electrically operated.
Pumps, anti-freeze injection systems, et cetera.
And that led to the shutdown of even more power plants.
It became a set of cascading failures.
- [Michael ] So we have a water problem,
freezing water,
become a gas problem,
become a power problem,
become a bigger gas problem,
become a bigger power problem,
become a water problem in the humanitarian crisis.
- [Presenter] At the same time across the state,
demand was surging
as frigid Texans were trying to heat their homes.
Six out of every 10 homes in the state
use electricity for heating.
The lack of supply
combined with the spike in demand
meant trouble for the grid.
The network used to deliver electricity to consumers.
To avoid massive equipment failures,
parts of the system are programmed
to trip off, if they get overloaded
which can happen when a lot of people
suddenly demand more electricity than normal all at once.
- We had to bring things back into balance
or the whole grid would have gone down.
And once the whole grid goes down,
it takes weeks or months to bring it back up
and we were within seconds to minutes
of a complete collapse.
- [Presenter] That's because when demand
far outstrips supply,
basically when things fall too far out of balance,
it can trip all the power plants
causing a system-wide blackout.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT
which administers Texas' grid
and serves about 85% of the state,
leapt into action.
- [Paula] ERCOT is like an air traffic controller.
They can see everything.
We rely on ERCOT to tell us
when they think it's going to get really bad.
- [Presenter] And this situation was really bad.
Power had to be turned off immediately
not with rolling blackouts,
but with controlled blackouts
that descended on certain parts of the state
and lasted for a couple
and in some cases, several days.
- So some circuits are on
and some are off.
Where we turned them off and kept them off.
- [Presenter] Low-income communities
tend to be more vulnerable in a crisis like this
due to poor infrastructure
and fewer resources to facilitate recovery.
One of the challenges,
was that when it comes to its grid,
Texas is a land unto itself.
- [Michael ] In the United States, there are three grids.
East, West and Texas.
Texas happens to have an independent grid
for a variety of reasons.
- [Presenter] Like being untethered by federal regulations.
And the fact that unlike most other States,
Texas can generate enough power within its borders
to be self-sufficient.
- We generate power, we transmit it,
we distribute it and we serve customers.
- But it means if things go wrong
we have trouble importing power from neighboring States.
So we can't lean on our neighbor the way most States can.
We're really on our own
when it comes to dealing with tough weather.
And so it's all great
until it doesn't work
and then things can fall apart quickly.
- So what happened in Texas
it's not just about Texas,
it's about aging infrastructure,
it's about the need to rethink our energy infrastructure,
the need to build in resilience
in response to a changing climate
in many many different parts of the world.
The risks 20, 30, 40 years ago
are different from the risks that we face now.
- Right now we're building our infrastructure
for yesterday's weather, not tomorrow's weather.
The next a hundred years will be different.
We know this.
That the weather events will be more extreme
and more frequent
which means hotter and colder,
wetter and dryer,
so we have to deal with this
and design for that.
- We need reliability and we need affordability.
While we work on
making the environment better.
We need to do outage management by a whole different way
so people aren't out all day
while we still try to prevent a blackout.
- [Presenter] Now, what happened in Texas, while rare,
was not unanticipated.
A decade ago, in February 2011,
a winter storm blew through Texas
leading to rolling blackouts across the state.
- And that led to a major report
with their official assessment and their recommendations.
Recommendations such as winterization.
Winterizing our plants so they work better when it's cold.
Just like they do in Northern climates,
like in Minnesota or the Northeast.
- [Presenter] Winterization could cost perhaps
tens of billions of dollars.
- Implementing the solutions
should take years to do.
A decade was enough
and almost like we didn't do it very much,
or certainly not enough.
Now we go to 2021, this will match hurricane Harvey
or even be more in terms of damage.
- [Presenter] The damage caused by the February freeze,
is expected to cause Texas about $130 billion,
well above the estimated cost of winterizing.
- [Michael ] We can do other things like,
consider connecting to other grids
so we can get reliability benefits from other States.
We could diversify the fuel supply
so we're not so reliant on fossil fuels.
We could integrate other technologies that let us
have either more resilience to bring the grid back faster
or to prevent the collapse in the first place
and then make sure our solutions are
implemented in an equitable way.
- They've been calls for upgrading
grid level infrastructure over the course of the past decade
in a place like Texas.
The question really is, why weren't we prepared
to handle such a catastrophe?
- We're an example of what can happen if you ignore reality.
If the most energy abundant region in the world,
can run short on energy, it can happen anywhere.
So climate science can be integrated
into our energy planning
to make the energy systems perform better.
That's what we need to do.
(soft music)