It’s unfortunate that this page needs to exist. But there is a lot of rubbish/ falsehood/deception/ disinformation going on around this topic that needs to be dispelled.
Disinformation around climate change in the media
Unfortunately propagated by a lot of right wing media and especially FOXNEWS, who for 20 years perpetuated the illusion that the debate on climate change was not settled when it was. In Feb 2021, when much of Texas was without power, Fox News talking heads were blatantly spreading disinformation blaming renewable energy and the Green New Deal, when the primary reason for the misery in Texas was the lack of government regulation around the fossil fuel industry. (If you want to better understand what really went wrong in Texas, you can listen to our interview on Ruckus Avenue Radio in the podcast episode “Let’s Talk Climate Change”, also here is a transcript of our answer on this topic from the interview)
What really went wrong in Texas
In some ways, nothing went wrong! The system – in this case the market, gave the result it was designed to give. And because of the way it was designed, EVERYTHING went wrong.
There are electricity generators such as the natural gas power plants that sell power to your local utility company that then distributes that power to your house. In Texas, the bulk electricity markets are driven by whoever is able to generate the lowest cost power at any given time and it’s purely a free-market based system. Now you would think there is nothing wrong with that. Except in a purely free market, the most efficient company will operate with a zero contingency, because contingency is pure overhead – until it’s NEEDED. And no individual company can unilaterally take the risk of having a greater contingency than their competitors because they would be out-bid due to their higher costs.
So, if you have a local bakery competing with another bakery and you have the higher costs, well you won’t survive and that’s capitalism for you and maybe that’s ok. But when you are a company that provides an essential service like power or water, you need to invest in some overheads called resiliency to prepare for events like the polar vortex – which maybe uncommon but are no longer unexpected. And that’s where state or federal regulators come in to level the playing field/ to ensure that happens.
But isn’t that what ERCOT was supposed to do; regulate them?
That’s a great question! We have been hearing that ERCOT is to blame. ERCOT is an entity in Texas that manages the flow of electricity between various power generators and the various utilities. There are about 6 or 7 regional equivalents of ERCOT in the US, they are called ISOs – Independent system operators. The biggest difference between ERCOT and the other ISOs is that the others are interconnected and governed by a common set of standards set by FERC; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
So, Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that is NOT governed by FERC. The Texas state legislature didn’t want to give ERCOT the sort of power that FERC has, which is to set minimum standards for things like maintenance, weatherization and fuel availability. Infact the whole point of keeping Texas outside of FERC was to avoid those exact types of regulations from being set. So, all this complaining and finger pointing at ERCOT is completely misdirected because ERCOT has no power to set the regulations and standards needed.
This meant that things like weatherization weren`t done. So, when the big freeze came, water vapor in natural gas supply lines froze shutting down power plants. And piles of coal froze into solid blocks rendering coal plants useless – which is really ironic considering, former Texas governor Rick Perry when he was energy secretary falsely considered coal crucial for grid reliability against extreme weather, simply because the fuel is stored on-site. Wind turbines were not fitted with de-icing equipment so they had to be shut down too. Now all these energy sources can work in freezing winter as they do in for example in New York, because they are equipped to do so. So for the Texas governor and senators to lay the entire blame on renewables such as wind is transparently ridiculous.
There is something else they hadn’t done in Texas that they haven’t done almost anywhere in the US, which could have enormously helped. In 2009, the Federal government, as part of the TARP stimulus gave billions of dollars for residential SMART meters to be installed. The objective was that the utilities could get remote access and customers could monitor their energy consumption in real-time. A lot of the utilities did install smart meters, but what they did NOT do was spend a little extra to install the software that will actually make those meters of any real use.
So, in an emergency, with the appropriate software the utilities would be able to disconnect AND re-connect on a rolling basis a percentage of homes, so that no homes would have been without power for more than maybe 6 hours. Instead without smart meter software in place, they had to use old technology based on pagers to disconnect large areas in bulk, prioritizing power for entire blocks that encompassed things like a hospital or a police station, but leaving areas without power for days, so people had to burn their furniture to keep warm, and their pipes burst causing real suffering.
Having your power cut for six hours is an inconvenience, having it cut for days is a disaster. It looks like it could have easily been avoided if the software had been installed.
Yep, totally.
And, it’s not just the power system to blame. The building industry is subject to similar market forces and cuts every corner to produce cheaper housing, RATHER than producing something MORE resilient to climate change for e.g. building to Energy Star standards. In Texas, building codes are also laxly enforced.
The crux of the matter is the biggest blame for this debacle comes down to a lack of government oversight. Being anti-regulatory has become a religion for some people.
So, if your friends and family are getting their “news” from FOX, please try to wean them off it. At this point, their rhetoric on this issue is downright dangerous.
Lies propagated by our elected officials
Some elected officials, mostly Republicans still refuse to engage with the reality of this crisis, either because they are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry OR because they are stuck, trapped by their own base who have drunk the cool aid (Fox News!!), and are now in a perpetual state of fear of being primaried.
For example, Texas governor and senators blaming wind power (which constituted a tiny portion of Texas energy mix in the winter) as the primary culprit of the extensive power-cuts during the Feb 2021 freeze.
Fossil fuel companies et al.
Heads of fossil fuel companies, industry trade groups and lobbyists have a real vested interest in keeping the status quo, the future of their own children and grandchildren be damned. The natural gas industry actively lobbies to block towns and cities from adopting building codes that would require new buildings to be pre-wired for electric cooking and vehicles.
But we have to be careful when dumping all the blame on the corporate executives – CEOs and the like for putting their companies’ profits first. Isn’t that what they are hired to do? To maximize profits and minimize costs? So we either need to change the nature of a corporation by redefining costs & profits – unfortunately that’s not happening anytime soon, OR we must change the framework in which they operate, in this case through regulation that assesses the real cost of pollution, and the simplest way to do that is a carbon tax.
Green washers
The biomass industry – going around chopping down old-growth forests and turning trees into wood pellets to be used into so called “green power”.
The entire recycling industry, which misled people into thinking that plastic could be recycled when they always knew that most of it would not be recycled. As a result today, only 9% of the plastic is “recycled” – but 7 of that 9% is only down-cycled, which means it only gets one more life, a meager 2% is in the virtuous closed loop recycle. For more detail, you can watch the Netflix Series – Broken: Recycling Sham.
Companies such as Coke and others who make grand press releases about their “distant future” plans for going green, make minimal, if any progress, and then some years down the road make new press release about new grand plans.