Texas’ freeze and the consequent human suffering have left the country in shock. While the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has announced its return to normal operations, the nation, and its experts are busy assessing the damage, looking for perpetrators, and finding ways to move forward. The blackouts and the price spikes have exposed systemic vulnerabilities in Texas’ current energy system and its unpreparedness to respond to adverse weather conditions. Pundits have been quick to throw blame at individual technologies (renewables, thermal power plants, or nuclear power), players (power plant owners, ERCOT, policymakers, or the Texas Public Utilities Commission), or market structures (laissez-faire vs. regulated). However, Texas’ power sources across the board failed, and California—a state with a fundamentally different market approach—experienced similar blackouts. Thus, it is not just any one actor that should be held responsible but the energy system as a whole.
Economically speaking, it is perfectly plausible that all market participants have followed best business practices, but the results were catastrophic. Markets are more than just the sum of individual actions. They are interconnected systems, and it is systems thinking that we humans often fail to internalize and act upon. This is a generic problem in the energy sector, also apparent in foresight studies that lay out energy scenarios for coming decades. Reviewing available energy scenarios reveals that no one anticipated the pandemic, in contrast to the intelligence and disaster communities (and even some airlines), who proactively developed pandemic scenarios prior to 2020. Similar to Texas’ freeze, in the case of the pandemic, the systemic weaknesses were known, but no action was taken. Anticipation is just the first step to preparedness, but without focusing more on high-impact low-frequency “wildcard” events, we will likely be asking similar questions in the aftermath of the next disaster.
1) Despite the different policies of Texas and California, are there common threads of policy improvements that could be made in both, and other, states to anticipate “wildcard” events and… Read more »
Diversity in our mix of energy sources is the most important aspect of avoiding such serious outages as demonstrated in California and Texas. Continuing to discount baseload generation to maximize… Read more »
The core message of the Texas energy crisis – with the additional knowledge from the earlier Enron crisis in California and California’s rolling blackouts last year – is that no… Read more »
It’s difficult to make common threads between the two. California has a mixture of market and regulatory structures that results in the worst of both worlds. It’s like a driving… Read more »
2) Are preparedness policies better left to the individual states or should there be federal guidelines?
Energy supply is too important to the welfare of our citizens and the health of our economy to leave to individual states. I would prefer to see federal oversight of… Read more »
We are one nation, with one economy, and we are mutually interdependent. The idea that Texas is an island, and that it can shape its own fate independent of its… Read more »
The Texas Freeze had multiple contributory events: one nuclear plant went down for a while, some coal piles froze, wind turbines froze (although on balance wind performed) and natural gas… Read more »
It is hard to compare California and Texas. The California grid is interconnected in the western region of the US. Most of the forest fires were in federally-owned lands, not… Read more »
Question 1 Mandates on types of generation never work – the so-called “political policy” makers don’t understand how to make a reliable electricity network. It takes common sense engineering and… Read more »
America needs to become Energy Independent and Energy Wise. We are a nation blessed with a lot of energy sources. We have more Btu’s in the ground in our coal… Read more »
1) A common thread in a number of comments is the need for diversity. This implies that mandates, like 100% renewable energy by a particular date, are too narrow and… Read more »
It’s difficult to make common threads between the two. California has a mixture of market and regulatory structures that results in the worst of both worlds. It’s like a driving… Read more »