Millions of homes in Texas are experiencing continuous blackouts for the first time in a decade because of a ‘Filomena’, an unprecedented wave of polar cold in the southern state, which has caused chaos in the US energy markets. The largest cities, from Houston to San Antonio, have had a day with power outages for stretches of up to an hour, as the electricity supply in the second-largest state in the US is experiencing sharp fluctuations due to the cold.
“All grid operators and all power companies are fighting to restore power right now,” said Bill Magness, president and CEO of Ercot, the state’s power grid operator.
The extreme cold surprised the highly decentralized Texas electricity market, despite warnings issued by the US National Weather Service of impending freezing temperatures a week ago. With about 2 million homes isolated at a time, the situation is expected to worsen on Monday. Ercot expects energy demand to reach an all-time high, breaking the record set during a heat wave in the summer of 2019.
‘Perfect storm’ in electricity
These are the first cold-weather blackouts since 2011. Peaks in electricity demand generally occur in the summer in Texas when the use of air conditioning increases in the summer. However, a frequency drop in the grid caused in part by the interruptions of the wind turbines, stopped by the snow, has caused the interruption of 30 gigawatts of generation. Additionally, many stations were undergoing regular maintenance operations, leaving the network more exposed to unusually large spikes in demand.
The temporary outages are likely to last through Monday morning and will be a permanent possibility until weather conditions improve, Ercot said in a statement.
Roughly 800 records of cold temperatures have been exceeded in the past week, as polar air drifted toward the Gulf of Mexico. Across the United States, winter storm warnings and weather advisories are affecting 157 million people, said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the US Weather Forecast Center.
President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency
Some areas of Texas had lower temperatures than Alaska, according to the National Weather Service. The temperature at 5 a.m. in Houston, closer to the Earth’s equator than Seville or Rabat, was -7 degrees Celsius, the same as in Anchorage, capital of the Arctic state. In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, thermometers read -15.
Freezing temperatures and a parade of storms in the US are yet another example of the parade of extreme winter weather events suffered this year, such as the Filomena storm in Spain. Texas, unaccustomed to the fury of winter, is being overwhelmed, with massive traffic jams on every highway and millions of people cut off by snow and cold. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency, mobilizing federal assistance to aid local response efforts.
Electrical crisis
The energy crisis is exacerbated by the lack of wind generation, with production that has fallen to 4.2 gigawatts, more than half of normal. Wind turbines can freeze in very cold weather, reducing efficiency, and blades can stop spinning. “When wind turbine blades become covered in ice, you need to turn them off,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy-focused research associate at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Texas network has relatively little connection to the rest of the country, making it an island when it comes to supplies.
Previously, spot prices for electricity in west central Texas topped the grid limit of $ 9,000 per megawatt hour, an increase of 3,466% from Friday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. US LNG exports also plummeted after the freeze forced ports and wells to close, and oil production was also affected. Oil extraction from the Permian Gulf plummeted by as much as a million barrels a day. West Texas Intermediate futures rose as much as 2.5%, above $ 60 a barrel for the first time in more than a year.
Cutting crude supplies threatens to unleash a shortage of all kinds, from propane to heating oil, which is used in mobile heating devices.
Odessa, one of the largest oil-producing areas in the Permian Basin, still has power, while San Antonio has lost power with continuous blackouts lasting 10 to 15 minutes, according to sources on the ground.
In Houston, there are long lines to refill household propane tanks and firewood is running low. The city can collect up to 2 inches of snow overnight, along with ice and sleet, the National Weather Service said, and will be hit again by another storm that brings ice and freezing rain on Wednesday. The most serious effects of the storm on citizens will begin to be seen in the coming days.
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