In mid-February, winter storms swept across Texas, crippling the state’s electrical grid amid subzero temperatures and skyrocketing energy demand. Texans went without power for days while businesses suffered billions in damages. Over 100 people lost their lives.
In the wake of the disaster, finger-pointing began almost immediately. Gov. Greg Abbott characterized the state’s growing renewable energy sector as a “deadly deal,” and the Texas Public Policy Foundation suggested that the crisis “never would have been an issue” if it wasn’t for the failure of renewables. Many in the media piled on, too. TV host Tucker Carlson declared that the Green New Deal had come to Texas, and an article from the Wall Street Journal described pro-renewable legislation as being responsible for the catastrophe.
Initially, the critics seemed to have a point: Frozen wind turbines, as many pointed out, did result in decreased generation capacity throughout the month. But as more rigorous research started to appear in the following weeks, it became clear that wind power had been unfairly targeted. While renewable energy played a role in the crisis, natural gas shortages emerged as the principal cause of the grid’s energy challenges; the scale of the outages, reports showed, would have been dramatically smaller had gas performed correctly.
As the blame shifted, pressure on Texas’s renewable sector waned, and bills targeting wind and solar died in the state legislature.
But when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas issued another conservation warning on June 14, announcing that historical levels of demand had created dangerous shortages in the grid, anti-renewable crusaders smelled blood in the water. Despite ERCOT’s report that natural gas was the crisis’s main contributor, the Wall Street Journal published an article contending that wind energy, not natural gas, bore the bulk of the responsibility for Texas’s energy shortages.
Again, however, these claims were dubious. The Journal editorial relied on one single graph for its argument, dug up from the Energy Information Administration’s real-time electrical generation database.
Pointing to the visible decrease in wind generation, the article argued that gas plants were mostly operating as normal but simply “couldn’t compensate for the huge reduction in wind power.” But this, too, was a misleading reading of the facts.
Wind energy output fluctuates constantly, hence its label as an intermittent energy source. In Texas, along with most of the United States, wind generation varies by season, with wind operating at its highest capacity in the spring and at its lowest in the summer. This is in part because warm temperatures often result in less wind.
Energy companies such as ERCOT know this and forecast for the fluctuations and seasonal decreases expected of their intermittent energy generation, with the goal of having enough energy capacity from other energy sources (e.g. coal, natural gas, nuclear) to make up for these changes. So, the mid-June decrease in wind energy generation wasn’t just unsurprising; it was anticipated. And the grid largely did its job — as wind generation dropped in the summer heat, natural gas production increased to replace it.
Renewables, then, were not chiefly responsible for the state’s energy shortages. Instead, much of the state’s problems have stemmed from unplanned shutdowns of local nonrenewable energy sources, kneecapping the grid’s ability to respond to unseasonably high demand.
On June 7, for example, a fire broke out at Somervell County’s Comanche Peak nuclear power plant, shutting down one of its two units. The plant was responsible for supplying about 1,150 megawatts to the grid when at full capacity, enough to power 1.15 million homes. Meanwhile, in the days preceding ERCOT’s conservation warning, the Barney Davis natural gas facility, based in Corpus Christi, Texas, was operating at just a fraction of its expected 933-megawatt capacity. And that same week, NRG Energy Inc.’s Limestone facility saw its output plummet far below expected capacity on consecutive days. Numerous other generators across the state were either out for repair or failing to meet capacity as well.
None of this is to say that wind energy bears zero responsibility for June’s events. As ERCOT reported, uncharacteristically low wind generation, combined with other underperforming renewables, was responsible for about 20% of the dip in ERCOT’s expected capacity. But every piece of preliminary data shows that renewables are far from the main story.
Politicians and media pundits should keep these nuances in mind going forward. Inaccurate and dishonest reporting on energy crises has serious ramifications — bad information leads to bad policy, and bad policy can impede the growth of the clean energy sector for years to come.
On Saturday, ERCOT retracted its conservation warning, signaling that Texans could return to their normal electrical usage. Throughout the week, demand never, in fact, exceeded supply, and significant generation capacity returned to the grid. Faced with numerous unplanned shortages, Texas pulled through, and it now appears ERCOT’s warning stemmed from an abundance of caution rather than immediate urgency.
Renewable energy, despite its imperfections, is a hugely important resource for diversifying energy supply, creating jobs, and reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Those who seek to make perfect the enemy of the good do a great disservice to the people of states such as Texas, as well as to the planet.
Christopher Barnard is the national policy director for the American Conservation Coalition. Thomas Hochman is a policy researcher for the ACC.
