Gas Froze You Out

ONE YEAR LATER

🥶 10 Million in the cold. $11 billion in profits. 💸💰

At 1:25 am on February 15, 2021, the Texas grid operator was forced to implement widespread power blackouts that lasted for days. The human impacts and economic damages in Texas, and across the U.S., were staggering.

More than 10 million Texans were estimated to be without power at the height of the blackouts. 

The power outages exposed and amplified existing inequities built into our electric grid system. Low-income and communities of color suffered disproportionately and faced a long road to recovery from the freeze. Texas utilities prioritized keeping power on in areas near critical infrastructure such as hospitals and supermarkets, which tend to be located in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. 

Officials have attributed 246 deaths to the storm, though another estimate put the death toll as high as 700. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimate the disaster resulted in damages totaling $24 billion, while Accuweather estimated the total damages plus economic loss from the storms amounted to $155 billion. 

The conditions that led to the historic blackouts also caused unprecedented spikes in natural gas prices well beyond Texas. Households across the Midwest were hit with massive gas utility bills because of the failures in one week of extreme cold.

Blackouts resulted from a failure of the gas system

Non-weatherized gas infrastructure caused Texas’ gas supply to collapse, which in turn limited many gas-fueled power plants from generating electricity. Other gas plants, as well as coal, some wind turbines, and one nuclear unit, failed to operate in the cold conditions because they were insufficiently weatherized. A postmortem of the crisis from prominent energy experts, published in the academic journal Energy Research & Social Science, concluded: 

“The primary culprit for the electricity system failure was problems in electricity production from natural gas. About 40% of natural gas production was not available during the crisis.”

Policymakers should have been able to predict the risks. The widespread failure of the state’s fossil fuel system occurred despite the state having endured similar problems in cold snaps in 2011 and 1989 and growing evidence that climate change is driving an increase in polar vortex disruptions that result in severe winter weather in mid-latitude regions. 

Disinformation ran rampant 

In the early days of the rolling blackouts, prominent conservative politicians and right-wing social media accounts began circulating disinformation that frozen wind turbines were to blame for the massive outages across the state, even though wind output actually performed better than the state’s grid operator was expecting from an extreme cold weather event. Key among the disinformation posts shared across social media was a photo of a helicopter spraying a deicing chemical on wind turbines which was actually taken in Sweden in 2014.

In the two days following the initial grid shutdowns, Fox News and Fox Business repeated the lie that renewable energy sources were the cause of the blackouts 128 times.

Booming renewable energy investment can help

During the height of the crisis, solar was the only generation source that outperformed its expected output. Following the blackouts, investors continued to pour money into clean energy projects — in total, wind, solar and battery-storage projects under development in the state are worth up to $25 billion. More than 6 gigawatts of new solar and almost 4 gigawatts of wind generation are expected to be added to the Texas grid this year. 

A 2020 report showed Texas is a standout global leader in renewable energy development, accounting for more than a quarter of all corporate renewable energy deals inked in 2019. 

A 2021 Dartmouth Thayer School of Engineering study showed that incorporating renewable energy into the grid bolsters its resilience against extreme weather events such as the Texas freeze and increasing-in-frequency heat waves. This comes as scientists say grid outages are expected to become more frequent and longer-lasting due to climate-change-induced extreme weather.  

Is Texas prepared for the next Arctic blast?

In the aftermath of the February 2021 blackouts, the fossil fuel industry successfully fended off reforms that would have required the gas production and delivery system to weatherize its equipment. 

Texas leaders have guaranteed that adequate weatherization of key infrastructure will keep the lights on. Public information requests of state inspection records tell a different story, however, showing that operators had not conducted weatherization testing for about 40 percent of the state’s critical pipeline and storage sites. 

The ongoing vulnerability was on display when a milder cold front arrived at the start of 2022, again causing gas production to buckle and knocked almost 12% of the state’s power plant capacity offline (more than half from gas units), and then in another winter storm in early February that similarly froze up oil and gas wells and produced near-record winter electricity demand. 

By choosing not to implement effective weatherization requirements for gas infrastructure, Texas is gambling that it will not receive another deep freeze weather event of the magnitude it experienced in the winters of 2021, 2011, or 1989.  

The Powerful Few Profit 🤑

While many households will be paying off the costs of the week-long cold weather event for years to come, it was also an estimated $11 billion windfall for a handful of gas pipeline and marketer companies. Pipeline operators Energy Transfer and Kinder Morgan were expected to earn an extra $2.4 billion and $1 billion of profit, energy trading operations from Macquarie, BP, and Bank of America all added hundreds of millions in extra earnings, and gas driller Comstock Resources bragged of “hitting the jackpot.” Meanwhile, according to a North American Electric Reliability Corp. official, there was at least anecdotal evidence that gas producers engaged in price gouging. 

In the months after the freeze, oil and gas executives provided Texas politicians with a big increase in campaign donations. Billionaires Kelcy Warren, S. Javaid Anwar, and Douglas Scharbauer contributed $3.2 million to Texas elected officials, up from about $2.2 million over the same period following the previous legislative session in 2019. In fact, after his own company made $2.4 billion from the freeze, Kelcy Warren cut a check to Abbott’s campaign for $1 million.