Beitrag Do 25. Feb 2021, 10:06

Half Of All Power Generation Was Forced Offline At Peak

Half Of All Power Generation Was Forced Offline At Peak Of Texas Crisis

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Just under half of Texas’ power generation, or 53 out of nearly 110 gigawatts, was forced offline at one point during the cold snap that swept through Texas this month, the head of the state’s power grid operator said during a meeting of its board on Wednesday.

The statistic was one of several eye-popping figures to emerge from an initial post-mortem of the Texas fiasco delivered by Bill Magness, the chief executive of the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid operator.

ERCOT has come under pressure in recent days over the actions it took to preserve the grid as well as its role in ensuring the grid can withstand extreme cold. The parents of an 11-year-old who died of hypothermia have filed a lawsuit targeting the agency. And many smaller power and gas companies, as well as a number of households, are furious that they had no choice but to pay exorbitantly high prices to continue accessing energy during the worst of the storm.

The consequences would have been far worse if ERCOT had not taken rapid emergency actions, which included deliberately cutting power demand from the grid to avoid causing a blackout that might have lasted weeks or longer, Magness stressed in the meeting. “It would be a much more devastating situation for Texans,” he said. “We might still be here today talking about when is the power going to come back on.”

As the Arctic blast pummeled the typically warm-weather state during the night of February 14th and early in the morning of February 15th, pipelines froze, natural gas couldn’t flow to gas power plants, and ice clung to wind turbine blades.

With growing numbers of power plants failing in the middle of the night, ERCOT staff called up transmission operators around the state to ask them to “shed” load — or disconnect electricity demand from the grid — in order to help preserve the grid's integrity. If demand on the grid significantly exceeds supply for even a few minutes, key infrastructure can fail entirely, a far more serious situation even than the one that actually occurred.

The maximum amount of load ERCOT requested to be shed at any given time was 20 gigawatts. The amount was “dramatically larger than anything we’ve ever seen at ERCOT,” said Magness.

The largest single source of power outages came from gas turbines, although wind turbines, coal plants and even one nuclear power plant failed at various points as well. Magness estimated that, of the natural gas power capacity that failed, around half may have been caused by instrumentation issues and around half from issues related to the failure to procure natural gas fuel — although that estimate was based on anecdotal knowledge and not data, he said.

The scale of the power outages far surpassed that of an earlier cold weather power crisis from 2011, which has drawn some comparisons. Back then a cumulative 193 generators went offline, dwarfed by this month's total of 356 generators forced offline. (There are 680 generating units in the Texas system today.)

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