November 21, 2024

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Two Years After Its Historic Deep Freeze, Texas Is Increasingly Vulnerable to Cold Snaps – and There are More Solutions Than Just Building Power Plants

8 min read


By Michael E. Webber, Drew Kassel, Joshua D. Rhodes, Matthew Skiles

Texans like to think of their state as the energy capital of the world. But in mid-February 2021, the energy state ran short of energy.

An intense winter weather outbreak, informally dubbed Winter Storm Uri by the Weather Channel, swept across the U.S., bringing snow, sleet, freezing rain and frigid temperatures. Texas was hit especially hard, with all 254 counties under a winter storm warning at the same time.

Across the state, sustained arctic temperatures froze power plants and fuel supplies, while energy demand for home heating climbed to all-time highs. Cascading failures in the electric power and natural gas sectors left millions of people in the dark for days. At least 246 people died, possibly many more, and economic damage estimates damages reached US$130 billion.

Water systems, which require energy for pumping and treatment, also were severely damaged. At least 10 million people were under boil-water notices during and after the storm, sometimes for weeks. Low-income and minority residents, who had fewer resources to find alternative housing and make repairs, suffered the worst impacts.

As energy researchers based in Texas, we have spent much of the past two years analyzing why the state was so unprepared for this event and how it can do better. A common knee-jerk reaction to disasters that cause widespread power outages is to call for building more “firm” power plants – those that use fuels like coal or natural gas and are designed to deliver power at any time of day or night. But coal and gas plants, and their fuel supplies, can fail spectacularly.

We think it is important to think beyond just building more power plants. Our findings spotlight other solutions that can be cleaner, cheaper and faster to put in place.

Planning for Winter

Analyses after Uri revealed that a lack of winterization in the electric and gas sectors was a critical cause of systemwide failure. The Texas legislature enacted new winterization requirements for electricity generators. But it did not do the same for natural gas producers, which provide fuel to about 40{1fb9a1c15189d4135f82280f4662feb221b42d698d466d57190d3cad7c7a0d7d} of Texas power plants and weren’t able to deliver during the storm.

Since then, Texas saw significant drops in natural gas production during winter cold snaps in January and February 2022. As happened during Uri, production at many gas wells was halted because water and other liquids that come to the surface with the natural gas froze when they hit a frozen wellhead, creating an ice dam and stopping the flow of gas into pipelines.

In December 2022, Winter Storm Elliott caused more drops in gas production, as well as power outages across the Southeast U.S. These events show that winter reliability risks are not specific to Texas.

Cold Weather Challenges

Our research shows that winter peak electricity demand in Texas – driven by electric space heating – has become more sensitive to cold temperatures over the past 20 years. Winter peaks are also growing faster and are more erratic than summer peaks. We know that every summer is going to be hot, but we don’t know for certain that winter will be cold, which makes it harder to plan.

Chart: The Conversation, CC BY-ND  Source: ERCOT  Get the data  Created with Datawrapper

Texas is at the forefront of a national shift to heating homes with electricity instead of oil or gas. About 60{1fb9a1c15189d4135f82280f4662feb221b42d698d466d57190d3cad7c7a0d7d} of homes in Texas use either heat pumps or electric resistance heating.

Heat pumps shift home winter energy demand from carbon-emitting sources like natural gas to electricity. They can also cool buildings more efficiently than older air conditioning units. However, heat pumps that aren’t rated for low temperatures can use more energy to heat in the winter than to cool in the summer. Better minimum efficiency standards can help mitigate this challenge.

The shift to electricity for heating indicates that within the next few decades, electricity demand in Texas is likely to regularly peak in winter rather than summer. Meanwhile, lower-demand shoulder seasons in spring and fall – the times when fossil fuel and nuclear power plants normally go offline for maintenance – are getting shorter, as heat waves start earlier and winter storms push later into the spring.