Seven questions on why the electric system couldn’t handle the icy weekend weather
The extremely cold weather of the past few days was marked by intentional electricity blackouts, as well as the usual power interruptions that occur during winter storms.
The situation has brought out numerous conjectures and theories on social media and elsewhere about what happened and how to prevent it in the future.
The following series of questions and answers address some of the more common theories being raised over the weekend, based on interviews and Eagle research:
Would more coal power have made a difference?
Some have postulated that a greater reliance on coal could have headed off the weekend’s problems.
However, coal generation is far from immune to interruption during extreme weather and it wasn’t over the weekend.
In the case of Evergy, the dominant power company in Kansas, coal plants wound up running at less than full capacity for a couple of reasons.
First, the coal reserves stored on site at power plants got wet and frozen so the coal wasn’t burning as efficiently as normal. Also, coal-fired power plants, like any mechanical system, are prone to breakdowns in sub-zero weather, said spokeswoman Gina Penzig.
While coal usage has decreased in recent years amid falling natural gas prices and an emphasis on wind energy, it’s still the largest source of power for the Great Plains. On Tuesday morning, some of the coldest weather of the current crisis, coal was generating 46% of the power in the Southwest Power Pool, of which Kansas is a part.
Would more renewable energy have made a difference?
That’s doubtful.
In the weekend emergency, moisture caused wind turbines to ice up. When that happens, the windmills have to be shut down, or the wind farm risks major damage from blades breaking off.
Also, under the best of circumstances, wind turbines don’t run as efficiently in cold weather because it takes stronger winds to turn them. Wind ordinarily produces about 27% of the power in the Southwest Power Pool. During frigid temperatures on Tuesday, that was down to about 12%.
Solar power, a small part of the energy mix in the Plains, was also compromised during the weekend emergency because of heavy cloud cover and snow. It’s ordinarily about 0.2% of the generating capacity in the Power Pool. On Tuesday, it was about 0.008% of the electrical supply.
Natural gas is cheap and plentiful, why didn’t we use more of that?
Ordinarily, that’s true. But for electricity generation, it’s more of a summer fuel.
Natural gas is useful for generating power when it’s very hot outside and the electricity demand is to run air conditioning. That’s also the time of year when there’s little to no demand for natural gas for home heating.
What happened over the weekend was that the freezing temperatures caused other energy sources to fall off the system and gas couldn’t take up the slack. At the same time as power plants needed more, so did home furnaces. That caused supply shortages and huge price spikes to buy it on the open market.
Would we have been better off if our electricity didn’t come from monopoly utilities and there was competition in the power business?
Some individuals have opined that having monopoly utility service had something to do with the power shortages and rolling blackouts.
Actually, it’s irrelevant to the situation.
In some areas of the country, electricity generation is deregulated and consumers can choose their power company — sort of.
Customers in those areas ostensibly buy their electricity from a particular company and pay that company for the power they use.
But in practice, all the power generated by all the companies is put on a common grid and distributed through shared systems, so the power is a mix of energy from every company that feeds into the system.
Paying for power from a particular company is basically an exercise in accounting that compensates a particular generating company for putting a certain amount of power into the system.
It has nothing to do with the overall supply at any given time and customers of any particular company don’t get preferential protection from rolling blackouts.
In fact, during this weekend’s storms, some of the worst blackouts occurred in Texas, a state where consumers choose their power generation company.
Did being in a multi-state power pool hurt Kansas?
That’s a complex question, as it was the Southwest Power Pool that ordered the rolling short-term blackouts that affected areas throughout the Great Plains.
The Southwest Power Pool is a coalition that includes privately owned utilities such as Evergy, government-owned municipal utilities and co-operative utilities that are owned by their members.
The Southwest Power Pool includes all of Kansas and Oklahoma, along with parts of Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Louisiana and New Mexico and North and South Dakota.
Those areas pool their power and the Power Pool calls the shots on distribution.
Ordinarily, that sharing arrangement offers significant advantages because power flows seamlessly to where it’s needed, especially on hot summer days. And when the power system is compromised by severe weather or a plant breakdown, it’s usually in a limited area and the other utilities in the pool can step up and provide power until things get back to normal.
It is extremely rare that the entire power pool gets hit with severe cold weather, as happened over the weekend, and there simply isn’t enough power to go around.
Over the weekend, the power pool responded to shortages by shutting off power for short periods in limited areas, then turning those areas back on and shutting off another area. While unpopular and inconvenient for areas that lost power for a time, it does seem to have limited the damage compared to more lengthy and widespread outages that would probably have occurred if the pool wasn’t there.
Would things have been better if we had the Keystone XL Pipeline?
Some have theorized that, but there’s little to no support for the idea that it could have made a significant difference. The controversial pipeline, rejected by former president Barack Obama, approved by former President Donald Trump and then rejected again by President Joe Biden, is designed to carry Canadian tar-sands oil from Alberta to the Texas gulf coast, where it could be refined for domestic use or exported.
The problem there is that oil has long been supplanted by cheaper natural gas as home-heating fuel in the Great Plains region and utility-scale diesel generators are few and of limited capacity. Oil generation is only about 1.7 percent of the generating capacity in the Southwest Power Pool, so any increase in oil supplies would have had minimal effect.
Speaking of Texas, did they steal our power?
Not very much, if at all. The country is divided into three major power grids, called “interconnections.”
Kansas is at the western edge of the Eastern Interconnection, which ends at the Colorado border. Most points west of that are in the Western Interconnection. Most of Texas is covered by the third grid, the Texas Interconnection.
Only a small fraction of Texas is in the Eastern grid, the relatively lightly populated panhandle of the state. Texas’ major population centers, including Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and Houston, are part of the Texas Interconnection.
The three interconnection grids are mostly incompatible with each other, so very little power can be transmitted from one to the other.
This story was originally published February 16, 2021 at 6:28 PM.
