Preface. In February of 2021, millions of Texans and Mexicans lost electric power in a hard freeze. Oxer (2021) on the March 2 Power Hungry podcast, said that if the Texas grid had blacked out, it would have taken until May to bring the grid back up. 85 power plants tripped off when the frequency dropped from the idea 60 to 59.7 and had to shed their load or the frequency imbalance could damage the entire transmission system, interconnect transformers, substations, power plants. Everything failed, even piles of coal froze solid, and gas lines dependent on electric compressors to reduce CO2 emissions failed when the grid came down. Not very smart huh, better to use compressors powered by the natural gas flowing through the pipes. He also pointed out this could have been foreseen, there were huge freezes in 1899, 1933, the 1957 Panhandle blizzard, 1960 Houston snowstorm, 1985 San Antonio snowstorm, 2015 winter storm Goliath, and 2017 North American Ice storm 2017.

As the grid fails more often from lack of maintenance, climate changed weather, and natural gas decline, I have to wonder if the rich won’t move to areas that have the most reliable electricity. During the height of this record winter storm, 4 million Texans lost power, but those who lived on grids that connected hospitals, emergency responders, or downtown commercial buildings and condos were more likely to retain their power. Wealth, income and housing inequality make it much more likely for Black and Latinx families in Texas to live away from densely populated and more expensive parts of the city — and when they do live in urban areas, to reside in places that are not deemed essential to the functioning of the electrical grid. They are more likely to live in areas lacking the robust infrastructure necessary to weather environmental and man-made catastrophes (Joseph PE (2021) What’s happening in Texas and Mississippi has to stop. CNN.)

Texas electric grid outage in the news:

2021 Minnesota gasps at the financial damage it faces from the Texas freeze When Texas’ natural gas supplies froze up, prices soared, and now Minnesota’s customers are looking at an $800 million bill. Washington Post.   “…The Texas market is so large — second only to California’s — and its natural gas industry is so predominant that when things go wrong there, the impacts can be felt across the country. And in a state that eschews regulation, driving energy producers to cut costs as deeply as they can to remain competitive, things went spectacularly wrong the week of Valentine’s Day. With its ill-equipped natural gas systems clocked by the cold, Texas’s exports across the Rio Grande froze up and 4.7 million customers in northern Mexico went without electricity — more than in Texas itself. The spot price of gas jumped 30-fold as far west as Southern California. And all the way up by the Canadian border, gas utilities in Minnesota that turned to the daily spot market to meet demand say they had to pay about $800 million more than planned over the course of just five days as the Texas freeze-up pinched off supplies. “The ineptness and disregard for common-sense utility regulation in Texas makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night,” Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, said in an interview. “It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country.”

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, April 2021, Springer, “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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From a post by Pedro Prieto on an energy forum:

One of the less studied things and the most ignored and covert things in the pro-renewable field is the existence of this growing problem, as we advance both to lower EROI fossil fuels to be used in electricity generation plants and at the same time, the higher penetration of renewables in a given electric network and specially when they start to look to alternatives.

The problem of a modern society relying more and more on electricity in their infrastructure functioning is not only the problems of managing an electric network to avoid collapsing for frequency or voltage deviations, as a result of sudden, unexpected variations, difficult to control. Or otherwise, the higher and higher reliance on automatism and robotic to take self-decisions to order regional or rolling blackouts to avoid the global blackout.

The elephant in the room, imo, is the ability of a given energy network to recover from a catastrophic failure in the shorter possible time, as our lives depend more and more from the umbilical cord of the electricity supply and energy security.And here is where the fossil fuel societal infrastructure and the electric network infrastructure have a totally different nature.

As we may expect more frequent and intense catastrophic events, not only due to climate unexpected variations, but also to increasing pressure of population demand or fast and sudden changes in social consumption (i.e. the ICT technologies increasing part of the electric cake), the problem is how fast (or slow) a society can recover from a complete shut down. We have seen clearly the case of Puerto Rico, with the hurricanes. They made the whole electric network to collapse. After one year, still many places had not electricity and others were abandoned forever. The infrastructure that collapsed, was mainly the electric transport and distribution grid. The wind and solar PV parks and plants were destroyed. The fossil fueled power plants were basically not affected. But they could not deliver fluid because the transport and distribution networks were down for months. 

And what type of societal system came to the rescue?  Perhaps 100% electric ships and vessels bringing spares? Perhaps 100% electric shovels and cranes and trucks removing the damaged materials and taking the new equipment to places and 100% electric pick ups transporting the O&M teams? This is the main issue. The gas wells in Texas could have been frozen, but when it comes to recover them, it will be oil and gas powered systems the ones going to rescue and erecting them again. And kerosene powered helicopters and trucks and vans equipment will also fly to deice wind turbines and check the restarts. Not the vice versa. This is the important thing. The asphalt roads are still there to be run by trucks and heavy machinery to repair themselves,when necessary. Not the other way around.fossil fuel siderurgy and metallurgy will have to work to manufacture new PV modules and wind turbines for Puerto Rico. Not the other way around.

The important thing is that energy storage with fossil fuels is much easier than with a full 100% electric world. Mountains of coal around the fired plants could power them for a full year. Huge oil and gas tanks can store energy safely and out of most of the catastrophic failures and be ready to supply. But oil and gas storage medium and small systems are also quite immune to big catastrophes up to the level of a car tank or even a 2 gallons oil canister or a gas cylinder, or a 3,000 kilos of chopped wood, able to solve a huge domestic problem for one or two weeks, if necessary. The density and versatility of stored energy in per weight and volume of fossil fuel derivatives has no rival in the disperse and low energy density renewables.

In trying to move to a 100% full electric society, we are moving fast forward to the perfect storm, unless the pro-renewables roll up their sleeves and recognize they have to start by presenting credible 100% electric, durable, workable and cheap enough storage systems. In heavy machinery, in transport (not only in BEVs), specially in heavy trucks to carry food and real essentials and ships and so on. Then, when we can see that this is possible and achievable. Then they can continue with home solar PV gadgets and wind turbines and private electric cars. Not the other way around, that is starting the house by the roof. Let’s do first the “green” hydrogen plants at scale and see if this works. Let’s build synthetic green ethanol or methanol in volume enough to store it in as many tanks and as big like those storing oil and gas in Houston and in all the present big refineries in the world. And then, we can talk, not before.  

Afternote: Pedro Prieto is one of my favorite people in the energy/ecology community discussions — original, funny, and his English is poetic perhaps because his native language is Spanish. He has built massive solar farms and co-wrote “Spain’s solar revolution” with Charles Hall. I especially like his concluding paragraph.