I really don't understand why Texas has such a problem with energy.
It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're not opposed to some natural gas and coal to make up the difference.
It's not like it lacks wealth to pay for those things, at least as far as I know.
I know it lacks inter-state interconnects, but that can't be the sole reason.
> There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind,
According to Newsweek article in January: ”Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it."
I don't think it's power generation that is the issue, but more distribution and protection of the infrastructure. As a commenter above mentioned TX produces lots of wind power (in the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms), but there's not strong regulation on the power companies to ensure the grid is working well. Case in point the cold snap a few years ago with TX govt officials and others crying "you can't make wind turbines work in the cold" despite evidence in New England and the Midwest to the contrary.
Much of TX energy infrastructure is above ground poles running along the highways. I don't know what the lifespan is of those but I wouldn't be surprised if many of them could be classified as antiques. If they aren't being regular inspected/replaced, they are likely to go down
Also, the energy companies can sell electricity to other states, and I won't be easily convinced that during this event they stopped doing that (because profits). Lastly, see previous winter event and direct recorded quotes from energy companies about how much money they were making by increased prices and I think there are several reasons why this keeps happening in TX.
> the early 2000s the only thing governor good hair did was build the hell out of wind farms
It really was not long ago that “free non-polluting energy” was a thing that Republicans could get behind. Even Bush got very into biofuels, albeit going about it in the worst way possible. That party’s taken a strange turn in the last decade.
There's plenty of electricity. The power outages are localized to the city where a hurricane just hit. Its a local delivery infrastructure issue, not a power generation issue.
It’s a hurricane. Hurricanes always knock down power lines and you need a bunch of crews to fix the wires. I don’t know if the power companies are doing this faster or slower than normal, but multi-day power outages after hurricanes has been a thing since the invention of electricity.
> August 25 – Hurricane Katrina moved ashore southeastern Florida as a minimal hurricane, producing a peak wind gust of 97 mph (156 km/h) at Homestead General Aviation Airport. Heavy rainfall accompanied the hurricane, peaking at 16.43 in (417 mm) in Perrine, which caused flooding in the Miami metro area. About 1.4 million people lost power during the storm. Later, when Katrina made its devastating landfall along the northern gulf coast, its large circulation produced high tides, light rainfall, and gusty winds along the western Florida panhandle. The hurricane killed 14 people across the state, and damage was estimated at $623 million.[54][55][56][57]
The ground in Houston is mostly clay and extremely wet. I'm no civil engineer but I imagine It would likely result in more issues that take longer to fix.
Not to mention Houston is huge and dense so switching completely to underground would be a massive project that no one is going to enjoy.
It's a transmission problem not an energy problem (this time). There is more than enough energy and generation capacity in the state. It just can't delivered to the last mile.
Based upon press releases from Entergy[0] (north of Houston/Centerpoint) a quarter million feet of wires need to be fixed. This doesn't include transformers, logging operations, etc.
I would estimate that Houston itself (Centerpoint) is probably dealing with a million+ feet of damaged transmission lines based upon the stats up here and their reported customer outage #s.
The area I (used to?) live in wont have power until the 14th because of the damage to the distribution infrastructure.
This is 99% a game of trees falling on lines and everything cascading from there.
And then to think that's just the Northeast corner of Houston that didn't quite take the full blast of the storm. The South and Southwest are likely worse, we just don't have accurate public maps of the outage.
So that 480 miles or so is probably less than a fifth of the total repairs needed.
I got the impression that OP was referring to total deferred maintenance of transmission lines in the entire Texas grid. If it is only storm related, that that seems more ballpark-accurate.
This is the natural outcome from their anti-government politics. Any legislation that would increase their reliability is shot down as ideologically "wrong". Practical Engineering has a great review of their outage in February 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
The electricity is ready and waiting, its the transmission lines that are down and out for people that were hit by Hurricane Beryl. CenterPoint energy (the owner of the lines around most of Houston) dropped the ball massively, underestimating how much damage the storm was going to cause and did not send out the call for linemen from other providers until it was too late.
Texas has its own electrical grid and insists on not connecting it to the Federal grid because I guess they think someday they really would want to be independent or some such. As a result their funding is different as is disaster recovery. Also consider that when you have a state where taxes on like 80 acres of land end up being $70/year, there just isn’t much government money to go around to keep the infrastructure running well.
Poor governance. ERCOT are simply not very good at achieving reliability, and the tendency to culture war of modern US politics is very bad at focusing public attention on any kind of problem that requires wonkish detail work to fix.
The state needs a lot of new power lines to connect up renewables. I believe there's a huge queue of renewables projects that have money and planning permission lined up and just need their grid connection approved.
It's a HUGE state. There's opportunities for plenty of solar or wind, and I'm sure they're not opposed to some natural gas and coal to make up the difference.
It's not like it lacks wealth to pay for those things, at least as far as I know.
I know it lacks inter-state interconnects, but that can't be the sole reason.