Some commentators have suggested that Texas’s growing share of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, underlies this past week’s grid failure, but others have quickly pointed out that renewables are not the dominant power source in the state. What is your perspective?
I agree that the renewables claim is factually bogus. In the wintertime, renewables comprise about 8 percent of the energy in the ERCOT-managed grid, and that’s primarily from wind sources. It’s true that some wind turbines are frozen or were frozen. But the failure this week has been primarily a failure in natural gas generation. There are a bunch of reasons. First of all, Texas is heavily dependent on natural gas. It’s a big natural gas production state as well as consumption state, but it doesn’t need a lot of storage for the natural gas, because production facilities are in-state. Most of Texas is very dependent on real-time production of gas. And the gas production infrastructure, as well as the electric power infrastructure, has been hobbled by freezing. Also, the state’s gas production requires electricity supplied by the state’s isolated independent grid for its operations. So when you shut down the grid, you shut down gas production, and it becomes a house of cards. Heavy dependence on natural gas, along with the lack of natural gas storage, has really put the state in a difficult position here.
