A failure to anticipate

 

Texas is in an energy crisis.  The most energy-rich state in the Union doesn’t have enough energy to meet an unexpected demand.

 

The utility structure asked itself “What is the worst that could happen?” then suffered a failure of imagination.  When building the energy infrastructure there was a choice between building a resilient system for more money, or the minimum that could be gotten away with for less money.  We went cheap.  Now our state is in crisis.  Boil water alerts because the water treatment plants can’t properly process.  Lack of water supply because there is less processing and people are using more by running taps overnight to prevent freezing.  People are supposed to boil any water they can get, but they don’t have electricity or heat to make the water safe.  There are mile-long lines at gas stations because only a few stations can make the pumps work or get more fuel when they sell out.  It’s a mess and people are suffering because the industry and the state never imagined that it could get as cold again as it last did in the late 1800s.  (A hundred-year event, which with climate change, will likely visit us much more frequently than that in the future.)

 

The governor of our state went on television to say this is what you get with the green new deal because the windmills are frozen.  That’s an absolute, and political, lie.  Not about the windmills, they are frozen, but about the scope of the problem.  Wind energy provides about 15% of our power in Texas and about half of the windmills have been knocked offline by the weather.  Windmills can be built to survive freezing weather, but Texas didn’t need to do that.  It never gets cold here.  (I’m told they have windmills in Norway.)  The bulk of the problem is that natural gas pipelines are frozen, and the big oil refineries outside of Houston are shut down because they can’t operate in sub-freezing temperatures.  None of that stuff was built to withstand temperatures ten degrees lower than normal.  (It’s not like all utilities can’t operate in colder weather.  I hear they even have electricity in Chicago!)  We have a state-wide industry problem, not a clean energy problem.

 

Compounding further, there are three energy grids in the United States.  Eastern, Western, and Texas.  Texas is isolated from all other energy in the country.  Can’t operate in cold weather?  Just call California, Nevada, or Arizona for some of their electricity.  Oops.  Can’t do that.  We’re Texas.  Know why we have our own energy grid, disconnected from the entire rest of the country?  Federal regulations.  If we connected with other states, we would have to suffer federal regulation just like every other state.  Know what federal regulation might have done?  It might have made us build our infrastructure to higher standards.

 

To quote Pogo, again, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”