Month: February 2021

Second in series of reports on renewable energy – a jewel of local reporting, following up on the Texas electric grid debacle, and its implications for the rest of us.

From WJRT, Flint, MI.

Houston Chronicle:

A study last year by scientists at Texas A&M University estimated that by 2036, extreme rainfall would become 30 to 50 percent more frequent in Texas than it was in the second half of the 20th century, and storm surge risk along some parts of the Texas coast would double by 2050.

“Prudent planning recognizes that we cannot know whether reality will end up higher or lower than the best available present-day estimates,” the report cautioned.

Already, grid operators are struggling to anticipate the demands extreme weather can place on a power grid. In November, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, predicted power demand this winter would peak at 57,699 MW – it ended up at more than 69,000 megawatts Sunday.

So far, ERCOT has not made understanding climate change’s impact on the grid a priority, said Doug Lewin, an energy consultant in Austin.

“We never hear the words climate change spoken at ERCOT because of the politics. It’s a taboo subject,” he said. “We’re using the past as a predictor of the future and we can’t do that. We’ve fundamentally shifted the planet’s systems, and it’s only just started.”

At a press conference Friday, ERCOT President Bill Magness said the organization would be reviewing how it goes about planning for extreme weather.

“We’re looking at any number of scenarios on how our forecasts are put together,” he said. “2021 certainly is a marker.”

Above, incredible report on insurance claims stemming from the Texas Blackout Debacle.

Below, University of Michigan Business School’s Andy Hoffmann told me many months ago about the coming threat to insurers, and the steps they are taking to protect themselves from climate risk.
Insurance companies set liability rules that can very much guide the course of big investors, corporations, and regulators.
If they get it now, that climate is an existential threat – then that’s a big deal.

New York Times:

In California, wildfires and heat waves in recent years forced utilities to shut off power to millions of homes and businesses. Now, Texas is learning that deadly winter storms and intense cold can do the same.

The country’s two largest states have taken very different approaches to managing their energy needs — Texas deregulated aggressively, letting the free market flourish, while California embraced environmental regulations. Yet the two states are confronting the same ominous reality: They may be woefully unprepared for the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters caused by climate change.

Blackouts in Texas and California have revealed that power plants can be strained and knocked offline by the kind of extreme cold and hot weather that climate scientists have said will become more common as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.

The problems in Texas and California highlight the challenge the Biden administration will face in modernizing the electricity system to run entirely on wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other zero-emission technologies by 2035 — a goal that President Biden set during the 2020 campaign.

Houston Chronicle:

WASHINGTON – For most of the last century, power grid operators in Texas could count on fairly reliable weather: hot summers and mild winters punctuated by the occasional, short-lived cold snap.

But with advent of climate change, historical weather charts are being tossed aside. Scientists predict Texas will experience more intense heat waves, more violent thunderstorms, heavier rains and maybe even more snow in what some call “climate weirding” caused by higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

While too early to say whether the week’s freakishly cold temperatures were the result of climate change, the state’s power system was not prepared for the extreme weather conditions scientists say we should expect in the decades ahead. The question now is whether Texas’s deregulated power system, in which preparedness depends on profits, is designed to handle the ever-increasing stresses of climate change.

“Whether it’s hot or cold, the weather’s changing. In my mind you need to be prepared for the worst of anything,” said Larry Weiss, the former CEO of the municipal utility Austin Energy, who now consults for utilities around the country. “There needs to be some incentive for power plants to stay on and be available. Right now it’s a free market in Texas, and you dispatch when you want to. If you freeze up, you just say, ‘Sorry.’”

In the years ahead, power experts say, Texas will need not only to better weatherize natural gas plants, pipelines and wind turbines, but also expand the amount the power generation kept in reserve for times of crisis when power plants inevitably shut down. Technologies such as grid-scale batteries and demand response systems, which reduce power consumption when supplies are short by turning down air conditioners and lighting, should help that effort.

Continue reading “Can Grids Survive Global Weirding?”

https://twitter.com/blkahn/status/1362579220199833603?s=20

Washington Post:

Humanity has no choice but to transition to cleaner sources of energy, but the build-out will require smart planning to ensure reliability. That means not only that utilities must deploy methods to store intermittent renewable electricity and that the government must invest in new interstate transmission lines to transfer energy from places where the wind is blowing to others where it is not. It also means building energy infrastructure to resist weather extremes that are likely to be more common. It is certain that heat waves, droughts and wildfires will become more frequent. Scientists are also assessing whether sudden cold snaps like the one that shut down Texas could be related to rapid polar warming, which might be disturbing frigid air currents that generally stay north.

Utility Dive:

But data from the state’s grid operator makes it clear that the majority of outages were caused by gas supply constraints corresponding to a major spike in demand. Though no power resource performed perfectly, power sector experts dismissed the idea that renewables alone were to blame for the outages.

Many questions remain, however, on whether grid operators in Texas were prepared, how generators could have better planned for such extreme weather, how they might in the future and whether future rolling blackouts can be minimized.

“The fact that this was not wind’s fault is not an argument that the wind system as we currently have it would have done better if it were a bigger part of the grid,” said Emily Grubert, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech. “It’s an argument that we need to be more prepared for emergency situations. It’s an argument that we need to think about how we’re designing a grid that is probably going to be subjected to more extremes than it has been in the past for climate change reasons, in particular. It’s not really a fuel thing. It’s a grid design thing.”

Houston Chronicle:

“Quite frankly, it’s time to look at whether Texas should join the national grid,” said Garcia, whose Houston district has been without power for days. “If we have to look at incentives to get Texas to do that — if it’s better for the Texas good, then I think we need to do that.”

Fletcher and Veasey penned a letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Wednesday asking for “a conversation on the benefits and challenges” of permitting outside energy transfers to Texas during emergencies.

“We understand that there are a number of legal, technical and infrastructure hurdles that will need to be overcome for greater interconnection,” the representatives wrote. “We firmly believe that every option should be explored so that we can avoid another catastrophic power failure.”

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio also believes the move should be “actively explored,” a spokesman said.

Some of the chamber’s most powerful Democrats appear to agree, and are at least skeptical of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit known as ERCOT that manages about 90 percent of the state’s electric load.

“The fact that Texas is almost like an island separated from the rest of the nation’s energy grids — I don’t think (that) helps because it’s more difficult for us to get power to them in the time of crisis,” U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., the chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, said during a hearing Thursday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called the outages “heartbreaking” but “predictable,” said Thursday that the energy committee will be investigating the outages “to see how things could have turned out better and will turn out better in the future.”

“Together, we must build back better an electric grid that’s cheaper, cleaner and more reliable,” Pelosi said in a statement this week.

Continue reading “Watershed: Texas Catastrophe Clarifies Climate/Energy Challenge”

NBC News:

As the Earth continues to warm, climate disasters are getting more extreme. In 2020, the impact was on vivid display with record-shattering wildfires in the western U.S. and the historic Atlantic hurricane season. PaidAd By TBD MediaGlobal Thought LeadersHow will your life be changed by the business leaders shaping the world of tomorrow?

Destroying homes and livelihoods, these types of events often act as triggers, leaving people with little choice but to move, especially if they were already socially or economically vulnerable. This phenomenon is called climate migration and it is becoming more common because of human-caused climate change. 

This past autumn we witnessed the beginning of what may be one of the most straightforward examples of climate-induced migration in Central America. Around 10,000 people have already attempted to migrate northward after two devastating storms hit, and many more are planning to leave soon.

In November, Hurricane Eta and Hurricane Iota, both catastrophic Category 4 hurricanes, made landfall two weeks and only 15 miles apart, near Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. They were two of the most intense storms of the most active Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history. 

With winds of 150 mph and devastating flooding from torrential rains, the storms impacted 6 million people, destroyed thousands of homes and displaced nearly 600,000 in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. With little to no government assistance, many of those displaced are living in shelters with little food. As of early January, the Red Cross reported 250,000 were still in emergency shelters throughout the region.

It’s not only housing and food that are in short supply; many people have also lost their livelihoods. The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock in Honduras estimates that up to 80% of the agricultural sector was decimated by the storms — an industry that, as of 2020, provided one-third of the country’s employment.

What’s most astounding is that they judged, accurately, I think, that they had to take this one seriously.

There is a direct relationship between the stupidity and paranoia of right wing social media, and the severity of the disasters and humiliations we have been facing in the last year.

Politifact:

A powerful winter storm has left millions of people without power in Texas amid freezing temperatures.

Some Facebook users blamed President Joe Biden — not for a particular policy, but for the storm itself.

In a Feb. 15 post, Scott L. Biddle wrote that the storm resulted from “weather manipulation and controlling the jet stream” — something he assured people is “not a conspiracy theory.” 

“Joe Biden’s ‘Dark Winter’ statement was not a random thought, it was a foreshadow of what was to come,” Biddle wrote. “Texas is the only state to have its own, entirely independent electric grid separate from the rest of the United States. This is warfare, an attack on Texas by altering the jet stream, seeding the clouds, and ultimately causing the storm that blacked out over 4 million people.”

“Sound crazy? Too hard to believe? Believe it.”

Don’t believe it.

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.) We reached out to Biddle — who wrote a book of COVID-19 conspiracy theories that was removed from Amazon — but we haven’t heard back.

What he said isn’t true.

First, let’s examine the “‘dark winter’ statement.” In November, Biden said the coronavirus pandemic could worsen over the winter months as Americans traveled for the holidays and were forced indoors by colder weather.

Continue reading “Politifact: No, Joe Biden did not Manipulate the Polar Vortex to Attack Texas”

WJRT – Flint, MI, Feb. 17, 2021:

MID-MICHIGAN, Mich. (WJRT) – (2/17/2021) – The frigid temperatures across the United States have been difficult to handle in the south. Energy companies are conducting rolling black outs throughout the country to help conserve what little power they can provide right now.

In Texas, Republican lawmakers are blaming the wind turbines — frozen by the unusually low temperatures.

But experts say that renewable energy source only makes up a fraction of energy in the state. The real problem is frozen natural gas pipes.

Here in Michigan, we use both natural gas and wind turbines to power our homes. So why aren’t we losing power?

DTE operated more than 400 wind turbines in Michigan. The energy company explained the state won’t see the issues states like Texas are facing right now because the turbines are crafted to handle temperatures as low as -30 degrees Celsius.

“Wind turbines can be designed and outfitted to operate in whatever weather conditions they’re expected to see, wherever they’re located,” David Harwood, DTE’s Director of Renewable Energy, said.

Knowing Michigan’s weather, he said DTE equipped their wind turbines across the state with what are called “cold weather adaption packages.”

Continue reading “Wind Turbines Thriving in Cold Midwest Winter”

Weird that we can run wind turbines just fine in deepest, frigid, Michigan winters, yet the fossil fuel funded politicians tell us that the turbines don’t run in the cold.
Only if you don’t weatherize, folks. They cut corners in Texas, and not just with wind turbines.
Gas, Coal, and nuclear plants failed due to lack of hardening to well-known potential hazards.
Big fossil lied, Texans died.