World Bank, IMF to consider climate change

in debt reduction talks

IT SHOULD BE ELIMINATED NOT JUST REDUCED

Andrea Shalal
Fri, February 19, 2021, 


FILE PHOTO: IMF and World Bank hold Fall Meetings in Washington


By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The World Bank is working with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on ways to factor climate change into the negotiations about reducing the debt burdens of some poor countries, World Bank President David Malpass told Reuters in a Friday interview.

Three countries - Ethiopia, Chad and Zambia - have already initiated negotiations with creditors under a new Common Framework supported by the Group of 20 major economies, a process that may lead to debt reductions in some cases.


Malpass said he expected additional countries to request restructuring of their debts, but declined to give any details.

The coronavirus pandemic has worsened the outlook for many countries that were already heavily indebted before the outbreak, with revenues down, spending up and vaccination rates lagging far behind advanced economies.

China, the United States and other G20 countries initially offered the world's poorest countries temporary payment relief on debt owed to official creditors under the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI). In November, the G20 also launched a new framework designed to tackle unsustainable debt stocks.

Malpass said the Bank and the IMF were studying how to twin two global problems - the need to reduce or restructure the heavy debt burden of many poorer countries, and the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions that contribute to climate change.

"There's a way to put together ... the need for debt reduction with the need for climate action by countries around the world, including the poorer countries," he said, adding that initial efforts could happen under the G20 common framework.

Factoring climate change into the debt restructuring process could help motivate sovereign lenders and even private creditors to write off a certain percentage of the debt of heavily-indebted poorer countries, in exchange for progress toward their sustainable development and climate goals, experts say.

The World Bank and the IMF play an important advisory and consultative role in debt restructuring negotiations since they assess the sustainability of each country's debt burden.

Many developing countries require huge outlays to shore up their food supplies and infrastructure as a result of climate change. Governments must also spend a large amount on alternative energy projects, but lack the resources to pay for those needed investments.

"There needs to be a moral recognition by the world that the activities in the advanced economies have an impact on the people in the poorer economies," Malpass said.

"The poorer countries are not really emitting very much in terms of greenhouse gases, but they're bearing the brunt of the impact from the rest of the world," he added.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva earlier this month told reporters about early-stage discussions underway about linking debt relief to climate resilience and investment in low-carbon energy sources.

Doing so, she said, could help private sector creditors achieve their sustainable development targets, she said.

"You give the country breathing space, and in exchange, you as the creditor can demonstrate that it translates into a commitment in the country that leads to a global public good," she said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

Bill Gates Reveals What Caused Deadly 

Power Outages in Texas

© AP Photo / Samuel Habtab

US

08:20 GMT 21.02.2021Get short URL

by Max Gorbachev

On Saturday, US President Joe Biden declared a major disaster in the Lone Star State allowing the government to allocate more funds to help millions of people affected by severe winter storms.

Bill Gates has revealed the reason behind the weather-induced crisis in Texas that resulted in power outages, leaving nearly half of the state's population under a boil advisory. In an interview with CNN, the Microsoft co-founder dismissed allegations made by Governor Gregg Abbott and other officials that solar panels and wind turbines were to blame for the massive outages in the state, noting that state's dependence on renewable energy isn't high enough.

Gates believes that the state's authorities should have spent money on weatherising energy plants. This, the software developer says, would have prevented the crisis.

"This is not because of renewable dependency. This is natural gas plants, largely, that weren't weatherised. They could've been. It costs money, and the trade-off was made, and it didn't work out, and it's tragic that it has lead to people dying", Gates told CNN.

Cataclysms, Instability, War

During the interview Bill Gates, who has donated over $50 billion to charitable causes, reiterated the need to address the global warming problem. Climate change is the root cause of all extreme weather events and the solution is green energy, Gates said. The philanthropist noted that without decisions on lowering carbon emissions and transition to renewable energy the world will face catastrophic consequences – the collapse of natural ecosystems as well as the inability to farm, which in turn will lead to war and instability.

According to the Microsoft co-founder, the deadline for the world to deal with the said issues is 2050. "2050 is literally the soonest it could get done given the scale and the number of things you have to change", Gates said.

The philanthropist believes that in an ideal world 80 percent of the energy will be renewable and come from solar panels and wind turbines, while 20 percent will come from nuclear plants. Gates even cited Texas as an example. When harsh climatic conditions make it unable to use green energy, a state can ramp up nuclear energy or draw from storage.

What Happened in Texas?

The Lone Star State as well as other parts of the United States has been affected by severe winter storms, with temperatures in typically balmy Texas plunging to their coldest in more than 30 years. The state's independent energy grid collapsed under high demand for heat and left millions of people without electricity. In Texas alone almost 50 people died due to the crisis, some of them due to carbon monoxide poisoning as they were running cars to stay warm.

City of Richardson worker Kaleb Love breaks ice on

 a frozen fountain Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, in Richardson, Texas

The extreme temperatures also damaged the state's water pipes, which resulted in low water supply. In Austin, the capital, more than 325 million gallons of water were lost due to burst pipes. This also prompted local authorities to issue a boil water advisory for almost half of the state's 29 million people, as officials fear untreated water may have been infected with bacteria. 

Electricity has been restored in many parts of Texas, though 80,000 homes were still in the dark on Saturday. Joe Biden declared a major disaster in Texas as well as a state of emergency in other states such as Louisiana and Oklahoma. Biden also said he would visit the state if it doesn't hamper the relief efforts under way there.

THE BIG FREEZE —
Deep in the heart of Texas’ collapsing power grid

Everything in Texas went wrong at once.

JOHN TIMMER - THURSDAY, 2/18/2021

Enlarge Aurich Lawson / Getty Images

Texas is now entering its third day of widespread power outages and, although supplies of electricity are improving, they remain well short of demand. For now, the state's power authority suggests that, rather than restoring power, grid operators will try to shift from complete blackouts to rolling ones. Meanwhile, the state's cold weather is expected to continue for at least another day. How did this happen?

To understand what's going on in Texas, and how things got so bad, you need quite a bit of arcane knowledge—including everything from weather and history to the details of grid structure and how natural gas contracts are organized. We've gathered details on as much of this as possible, and we also talked to grid expert Jeff Dagle at Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL). What follows is an attempt to organize and understand an ongoing, and still somewhat chaotic, situation.
Why is Texas so much worse off?

While other states have seen customers lose power, Texas has been hit the hardest, with far more customers losing power for substantially longer.

One key reason for this is because Texas maintains its own power grid largely in isolation from those of its neighbor states. In North America, most customers are served by two major grids that operate on the same alternating current frequency—one serving the eastern half of the continent (including the US, Canada, and parts of Mexico) and the other serving the western half. However, Texas—along with Quebec—both maintain power grids that are largely separate from these larger networks.

So, while problems elsewhere in the Midwest were partly buffered by generating capacity elsewhere in the country, Texas was on its own. It does have interconnections with neighboring grids, but they don't offer much in the way of capacity—and they weren't built for importing power anyway. According to Jeff Dagle of PNNL, these interconnections were mostly built by utilities near the border between grids so that the utilities could use power from whatever source happened to be cheapest at the time. Only half a dozen of these interconnects exist, and they can only handle a few hundred Megawatts each. This is simply "too small to matter," as Dagle put it.


Given that Texas and Quebec are both fierce defenders of their independence, it's tempting to view their insistence on maintaining their own grids as something of a caricature. But it's a caricature rooted in reality. Grids began to integrate because the easiest places to generate power—near large coal fields, for example—weren't necessarily close to large population centers. Texas remained relatively isolated during this buildout period because there weren't real advantages to integrating with its neighbors. Its grid ended up managed by ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, a nonprofit with a complicated state/private governance structure.
The map of the areas served by ERCOT. By not extending across the borders to other states, Texas has limited the federal regulation of its grid.

ERCOT

Then, when some degree of national power grid regulation began, it was done under the federal government's constitutional ability to regulate "interstate commerce." By purposely keeping its grid within the borders of Texas, the state limited the impact of federal standards and regulations. This deep-seated aversion to regulation recently prompted former US Energy secretary and Texas Governor Rick Perry to quip, "Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.”

How did a cold snap trigger this crisis?

The typical power demand profile in Texas would show a big peak in the summer, when most of the state has to run air conditioning 24 hours a day to keep its inhabitants from melting. Because of this, power generators schedule needed maintenance and upgrades for the winter months, when demand is generally lower. As a result, the Texas grid is less able to match spikes in demand during the winter.

And the recent cold snap set off a huge spike in demand. Lots of buildings in Texas are heated by electricity, and the cold, which blanketed the entire state, sent demand for heating through the roof. Natural gas is typically used where electricity isn't, and its increased use also set off a competition for gas supplies, which quickly became limited for reasons we'll get back to in a moment.

Typically, grid managers have a set of reserve plants that can be brought online if demand spikes suddenly. In a competitive electricity market, prices will rise if demand threatens to exceed supply, inducing producers to activate idle plants. For some reason, this didn't work out in Texas. ERCOT places a cap of $9,000 per Megawatt-hour on the cost of power in its grid. At various times after the cuts began, however, prices were only $1,200 per Megawatt-hour, and the Public Utilities Commission of Texas isn't sure why.

But even if reserves and economics had all kicked in, Texas wouldn't have avoided problems, because generating sources were shutting down left and right.

What shut down in Texas?

Pretty much everything, though for different reasons. Wind turbines iced up and stopped generating, cutting into the grid contribution of renewable power. But wind (and solar) don't produce as much power during the Texas winter under normal circumstances, so the loss of some capacity there wasn't as much of a problem as it might have been in summer; they weren't expected to produce much anyway.

As we mentioned above, the natural gas market saw power generators competing with home users for a limited supply of natural gas. That gas supply ended up being even more limited by the fact that as much as half the state's natural gas production may have ground to a halt. Natural gas doesn't come out of the wells as a pure gas, and one of its major contaminants is water. As temperatures dropped, that water froze in inopportune places, choking off the flow of gas.

Texas happens to have the second-largest capacity to store natural gas of all the states. It's not clear whether storage suffered from similar problems or if there was some other reason it couldn't buffer the loss of supply.
Enlarge / The shutdown of large areas of the power grid has shutdown a lot of the things people count on for day-to-day living, like this grocery store.
Montinique Monroe / Getty Images

In any event, in the competition between power plants and residential users for the limited gas supplies, residential users won. PNNL's Dagle told Ars that most of the contracts for natural gas delivery can be broken without penalty if the supply isn't there. That's partly because there are alternate ways for grid operators to generate power, while many residences have no other way to produce heat. But Dagle said it was also for practical reasons; it's easy and safe to restart a couple of gas turbines when supply returns, but it's a nightmare to ensure that every consumer gas-fueled appliance is operating safely when gas is restored.

"When the gas supply's constrained, the contract calls for them to be curtailed on the generation-side," Dagle told Ars. "That's quite normal."

A somewhat larger surprise was that Texas also lost nuclear and coal capacity. Rick Perry, while at the Department of Energy, tried to pay coal and nuclear plants to keep fuel stored onsite (a policy that ended up being rejected), under the assumption that it would ensure a reliable supply of energy. Clearly, that didn't work out. And there's some reason to expect it wouldn't help in cases like this, as giant piles of coal can completely ice over in cold weather, making it difficult to use.Advertisement


Beyond that, Dagle said that both coal and nuclear rely on water to generate power. This water has to replace any of the material that's lost as steam from the portion used for generation, and it may be used as part of a cooling or condensing system. If the water intakes freeze up, then the plant will inevitably have to shut down.
Shouldn’t Texas have been ready for this?

Yes and no—it depends on how you define "this."

Power plants obviously operate much farther north than Texas, in areas where the conditions Texas is facing now are normal for weeks or months at a time. There are ways to cold-proof various systems; wind turbines, for example, can have heaters embedded in the blades to shed ice when needed, intake pipes can be heated by exhaust from power plants, etc. But all of these measures cost additional money, which may be difficult to justify if the conditions they're needed for are extremely rare.

It turns out that these conditions are rare in Texas, but not extremely so; Texas faced something similar a decade earlier, in 2011, when its grid suffered similar failures. In the wake of these earlier problems, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a report suggesting changes to the grid in order to prevent a recurrence. Obviously, if there's a similar event today, it must mean those changes weren't made, right?

Not quite. Dagle told Ars that the earlier event was probably not as cold as the conditions Texas has faced this week. Even if the people operating power plants had made changes that would have gotten them through the 2011 event, those changes might not have been sufficient to handle this week. In addition, the Texas grid, like the rest of the US, has become increasingly reliant on natural gas supplies over the last decade. According to the FERC report, in 2011, Texas lost over a million Megawatt-hours to frozen hardware and mechanical failures; it lost only 120,000 Megawatt-hours to fuel supply problems. The reported problems with natural gas supplies this time around suggest that those numbers will now look very different.

Enlarge / While bad weather can damage transmission hardware, so far, most of Texas' problems appear to be on the generation-side.

Ron Jenkins / Getty Images

Finally, Dagle noted that, in the absence of actual cold weather, it's hard to test whether the hardware you've put in place to protect against it is actually effective. "It's kind of hard to find all these problems when you can't test it," Dagle said. In Minnesota, you will know if things work in the next winter. In Texas, you might have to wait a decade for a stress test.

"Clearly, they didn't do enough," Dagle told Ars, "but I don't know how fair it is to be too critical."

What do we do now?

Over the course of Wednesday, ERCOT seems to have brought roughly 7 Gigawatts of generating capacity back on line, and supplies have continued to ramp up on Thursday. Its measure of demand has also gone up, but that's not an indication that actual demand is lagging supply; instead, it means more areas of the grid are receiving power. In other words, ERCOT is still managing demand by keeping power cut off to many locations.

Demand has to be kept well below supply because ERCOT plans to start shifting back to rolling blackouts and away from permanent shutdowns. This presents a big challenge, because lots of appliances—heaters, refrigerators, and such—will immediately shift to operating at maximum levels the moment that power is restored. Doing this safely, by ensuring that there's enough excess power to cover this surge, requires building lots of models based on a neighborhood's typical usage—a process that grid operators have hopefully been engaged with since the blackouts began in earnest.

Enlarge / A utilities truck drives down the street in front of darkened homes in McKinney, Texas.

Bloomberg / Getty Images

There's good news on the way, though, with our own Eric Berger indicating that warm weather should take hold on Friday, reducing power demand, potentially restoring more hardware to service, and hopefully getting more natural gas into the pipelines. For those who have been suffering in the dark for days, Friday remains a long way off, but the end is at least in sight.

Key steps will still need to be taken months from now. That's when the data should be gathered to analyze what went wrong and figure out how to build a more resilient—and necessarily more expensive—grid. It may also involve Texas giving up a bit of its "go it alone" attitude and forging deeper connections with neighbors, possibly accepting a greater degree of federal oversight. Dagle told Ars that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which sets standards for the combined US-Canadian grids, has new standards out for cold-weather operations. These might provide a useful guide for how to avoid events like this in the future, but the standards aren't mandatory yet.

Dagle highlighted the concept of resilience. "Resilience is imagining the things that could go wrong and making sure that we're prepared to accommodate that," he said. That means thinking beyond simply matching the last major cold wave. "Maybe we could have done a better job envisioning temperatures even more extreme than what we saw last time," he said. "Have we put enough counter measures there to handle that?"

While such resilience might make electricity somewhat more expensive, it's also a strong insurance policy against the staggering losses that are being incurred with most of the state shut down entirely.

So far, the signs for change aren't good. In addition to Perry's quip about Texans being willing to suffer through blackouts to avoid any oversight, the present Texas governor, Greg Abbott, is busy blaming renewable power for failures that disproportionately affected fossil fuel generation.

Why a predictable cold snap crippled the Texas power grid


By Tim McLaughlin, Stephanie Kell

(Reuters) - As Texans cranked up their heaters early Monday to combat plunging temperatures, a record surge of electricity demand set off a disastrous chain reaction in the state’s power grid.

Wind turbines in the state’s northern Panhandle locked up. Natural gas plants shut down when frozen pipes and components shut off fuel flow. A South Texas nuclear reactor went dark after a five-foot section of uninsulated pipe seized up. Power outages quickly spread statewide - leaving millions shivering in their homes for days, with deadly consequences.

It could have been far worse: Before dawn on Monday, the state’s grid operator was “seconds and minutes” away from an uncontrolled blackout for its 26 million customers, its CEO has said. Such a collapse occurs when operators lose the ability to manage the crisis through rolling blackouts; in such cases, it can take weeks or months to fully restore power to customers.

Monday was one of the state’s coldest days in more than a century - but the unprecedented power crisis was hardly unpredictable after Texas had experienced a similar, though less severe, disruption during a 2011 cold snap. Still, Texas power producers failed to adequately winter-proof their systems. And the state’s grid operator underestimated its need for reserve power capacity before the crisis, then moved too slowly to tell utilities to institute rolling blackouts to protect against a grid meltdown, energy analysts, traders and economists said.

Early signs of trouble came long before the forced outages. Two days earlier, for example, the grid suddenly lost 539 megawatts (MW) of power, or enough electricity for nearly 108,000 homes, according to operational messages disclosed by the state’s primary grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

The crisis stemmed from a unique confluence of weaknesses in the state’s power system.

Texas is the only state in the continental United States with an independent and isolated grid. That allows the state to avoid federal regulation - but also severely limits its ability to draw emergency power from other grids. ERCOT also operates the only major U.S. grid that does not have a capacity market - a system that provides payments to operators to be on standby to supply power during severe weather events.

After more than 3 million ERCOT customers lost power in a February 2011 freeze, federal regulators recommended that ERCOT prepare for winter with the same urgency as it does the peak summer season. They also said that, while ERCOT’s reserve power capacity looked good on paper, it did not take into account that many generation units could get knocked offline by freezing weather

“There were prior severe cold weather events in the Southwest in 1983, 1989, 2003, 2006, 2008, and 2010,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and North American Electric Reliability Corp staff summarized after investigating the state’s 2011 rolling blackouts. “Extensive generator failures overwhelmed ERCOT’s reserves, which eventually dropped below the level of safe operation.”

ERCOT spokeswoman Leslie Sopko did not comment in detail about the causes of the power crisis but said the grid’s leadership plans to re-evaluate the assumptions that go into its forecasts.

The freeze was easy to see coming, said Jay Apt, co-director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center.

“When I read that this was a black-swan event, I just have to wonder whether the folks who are saying that have been in this business long enough that they forgot everything, or just came into it,” Apt said. “People need to recognize that this sort of weather is pretty common.”

This week’s cold snap left 4.5 million ERCOT customers without power. More than 14.5 million Texans endured a related water-supply crisis as pipes froze and burst. About 65,000 customers remained without power as of Saturday afternoon, even as temperatures started to rise, according to website PowerOutage.US.

State health officials have linked more than two dozen deaths to the power crisis. Some died from hypothermia or possible carbon monoxide poisoning caused by portable generators running in basements and garages without enough ventilation. Officials say they suspect the death count will rise as more bodies are discovered.

THIN POWER RESERVE

In the central Texas city of Austin, the state capital, the minimum February temperature usually falls between 42 and 48 degrees Fahrenheit (5 to 9 degrees Celsius). This past week, temperatures fell as low as 6 degrees Fahrenheit (-14 degrees Celsius).

In November, ERCOT assured that the grid was prepared to handle such a dire scenario.

“We studied a range of potential risks under both normal and extreme conditions, and believe there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers,” said ERCOT’s manager of resource adequacy, Pete Warnken, in a report that month.

Warnken could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Under normal winter conditions, ERCOT forecast it would have about 16,200 MW of power reserves. But under extreme conditions, it predicted a reserve cushion of only about 1,350 MW. That assumed only 23,500 MW of generation outages. During the peak of this week’s crisis, more than 30,000 MW was forced off the grid.

Other U.S. grid operators maintain a capacity market to supply extra power in extreme conditions - paying operators on an ongoing basis, whether they produce power or not. Capacity market auctions determine, three years in advance, the price that power generators receive in exchange for being on emergency standby.

Instead, ERCOT relies on a wholesale electricity market, where free market pricing provides incentives for generators to provide daily power and to make investments to ensure reliability in peak periods, according to economists. The system relied on the theory that power plants should make high profits when energy demand and prices soar - providing them ample money to make investments in, for example, winterization. The Texas legislature restructured the state’s electric market in 1999.

LOOMING CRISIS

Since 2010, ERCOT’s reserve margin - the buffer between generation capacity versus forecasted demand - has dropped to about 10% from about 20%. This has put pressure on generators during demand spikes, making the grid less flexible, according to North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a nonprofit regulator.

That thin margin for error set off alarms early Monday morning among energy traders and analysts as they watched a sudden drop in the electrical frequency of the Texas grid. One analyst compared it to watching the pulse of a hospital patient drop to life-threatening levels.

Too much of a drop is catastrophic because it would trigger automatic relay switches to disconnect power sources from the grid, setting off uncontrolled blackouts statewide. Dan Jones, an energy analyst at Monterey LLC, watched from his home office in Delaware as the grid’s frequency dropped quickly toward the point that would trigger the automatic shutdowns.

“If you’re not in control, and you are letting the equipment do it, that’s just chaos,” Jones said.

By Sunday afternoon about 3:15 p.m. (CST), ERCOT’s control room signaled it had run out of options to boost electric generation to match the soaring demand. Operators issued a warning that there was “no market solution” for the projected shortage, according to control room messages published by ERCOT on its website.

Adam Sinn, president of Houston-based energy trading firm Aspire Commodities, said ERCOT waited far too long to start telling utilities to cut customers’ power to guard against a grid meltdown. The problems, he said, were readily apparent several days before Monday.

“ERCOT was letting the system get weaker and weaker and weaker,” Sinn said in an interview. “I was thinking: Holy shit, what is this grid operator doing? He has to cut load.”

Sinn said he started texting his friends on Sunday night, warning them to expect widespread outages.

‘SECONDS AND MINUTES’

Early Monday morning, one of the largest sources of electricity in the state - the unit 1 reactor at the South Texas Nuclear Generating Station - stopped producing power after the small section of pipe froze in temperatures that averaged 17 degrees Fahrenheit (9 degrees Celsius). The grid lost access to 1,350 MW of nuclear power - enough to power about 270,000 homes - after automatic sensors detected the frozen pipe and protectively shut down the reactor, said Victor Dricks, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

About 2:30 a.m. (CST), the South Plains Electric Cooperative in Lubbock said it received a phone call from ERCOT to cut power to its customers. Inside the ERCOT control room, staff members scrambled to call utilities and cooperatives statewide to tell them to do the same, according to operational messages disclosed by the grid operator.

Three days later, ERCOT Chief Executive Bill Magness acknowledged that the grid operator had only narrowly avoided the calamity of uncontrolled blackouts.

“If we hadn’t taken action,” he said on Thursday, “it was seconds and minutes (away), given the amount of generation that was coming off the system at the same time that the demand was still going up.”


Reporting by Tim McLaughlin and Stephanie Kelly; additional reporting by Nichola Groom; editing by Simon Webb and Brian Thevenot

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Texas and California built different power grids, but neither stood up to climate change

The winter storm that crippled Texas this week and heat wave the hit California last summer show much more needs to be done to protect power supplies from extreme weather.


An Oncor Electric Delivery crew works on restoring power to a neighborhood following the winter storm that passed through Texas. | Eli Hartman/Odessa American via AP


By ERIC WOLFF, DEBRA KAHN and ZACK COLMAN

02/21/2021

Texas and California may be worlds apart in their politics and climate policies, but they have something in common: Extreme weather crashed their power grids and left people stranded in the dark.

The two sprawling, politically potent states have devoted massive sums to their power networks over the past two decades — California to produce huge amounts of wind and solar energy, Texas to create an efficient, go-it-alone electricity market built on gas, coal, nuclear and wind. But neither could keep the lights on in the face of the type of brutal weather that scientists call a taste of a changing climate.


That presents both an opportunity and a challenge for President Joe Biden, potentially aiding his efforts to draw support from lawmakers and states for his multitrillion-dollar proposals to harden the nation's energy infrastructure to withstand climate change. But he’s already facing entrenched resistance to his pledges to shift the nation to renewable energy by 2035 — including from fossil fuel advocates who have sought to scapegoat wind and solar for the energy woes in both states.

The catastrophe this week in Texas left more than 4 million people in the dark and the cold, and even more without clean water, when a rare blast of Arctic air drove temperatures down, freezing both natural gas plants and wind turbines.

Texas “planned more for heatwaves than for ice storms,” said Dan Reicher, who worked in the Clinton administration's Energy Department on renewable energy and is now at Stanford University. And the onus now is on figuring out how to prevent a repeat — a tricky situation given the independence of Texas’ grid and sharp opposition from Republicans there to linking up to other states and giving federal regulators oversight of its power system.

So far, the Biden administration has shown little sign of pushing its agenda on Texas, which already leads the nation in wind power. But Congress is eyeing hearings to look at this week's power failures, which are likely to put a spotlight on the state's grid.

“How much and how far does the Biden administration want to dig into this from the broader federal perspective? And that remains to be seen,” Reicher said.

Though scientists haven't definitively tied climate change to the polar vortex that sent temperatures plummeting this week, evidence is starting to show that years of rising temperatures in the Arctic may be playing a role in altering the path of the jet stream that fed the frigid winds into the southern states.

“The way I think about it is you’re opening the door to the freezer," said Katharine Hayhoe, atmospheric scientist and professor of political science at Texas Tech University.

And while Texas A&M University climate scientist Andrew Dessler said the link to climate change hadn't been settled, it's undeniable that climate change is fueling more “tail risk” events that were once considered rare. And both Texas and California, which suffered both a devastating heat wave and record wildfires last year, present important questions for how to safeguard critical infrastructure in a warmer world.

“It's kind of the insurance question," Dessler said. "How much do you pay for insurance and take the chance that you'll never use it, versus not having insurance and then getting wiped out?"

California has been experiencing the effects of climate change on its grid for years — wildfires that threaten transmission have grown in size and duration, heat waves have increased in intensity and duration, and droughts in the Northwest are restricting crucial supplies of hydropower. In response to mounting liabilities from wildfire damages, which forced utility Pacific Gas & Electric Company into bankruptcy in 2019, the state's utilities have increasingly been shutting off transmission lines during wind storms in order to reduce the likelihood of sparking blazes.

In an effort to reduce carbon emissions and bring more power generation in-state, California set aggressive renewable targets, increasing the amount of solar capacity on its grid in the past decade to 27 gigawatts in 2019, more than one-third of the nation's solar output, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. And to balance its grid, it's helped build an 11-state power market that enables it to export excess solar power during the day and draw in electricity from other sources after sunset.

But August's unplanned blackouts — the state's first since the energy crisis of 2000-2001 — underscored other weaknesses in California's grid. A state analysis of the failures that shut off power for 490,000 customers for two hours one night and 320,000 customers for less time another night, pinned blame on the historic West-wide heat wave, which saw demand surge and limited the amount of power California could import from other states. But it also pointed to the state's high proportion of renewables, which see their electricity output drop sharply as the sun goes down, requiring other power plants to ramp up quickly — and which they were unable to do that week.

Like California, Texas suffered from an energy shortage at a key moment: In the space of an hour early Monday morning, 30 gigawatts of generation — one quarter of the state's entire capacity — dropped off the grid just as a deep freeze drove demand up to levels usually only seen in summer. That led to several days of blackouts affecting 4.4 million Texas customers.

Texas' problems may stem partly from its an open market rules that differ from markets in other regions around the country, many of which require a "capacity market" where power producers commit to keep their plants available years in the future. When the cold snap descended on the state, curbing shipments of natural gas and freezing wind turbines, several power plants that could have helped fill the gap were off line for maintenance.

And the state also failed to heed the warnings from a report on a similar freeze in 2011, which called for insulating generators to protect against the cold — a costly fix, but one that could have mitigated the outages.

Experts say increasing the connections around the country that allow power to move long distances could help prevent future blackouts.

Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said both Texas and California could benefit from greater coordination with their neighbors — and Biden can help with that.

"There's a shared dilemma between our situations, and it relates to how to take account of the weather extremes associated with climate change," he said. "In both situations, the real world exceeded, by a large margin, the planned-for extreme case."

Texas has resisted that strategy, and by refusing to cross state lines, the state has kept federal regulators away from its power grid. That’s left it on its own when resources fail to meet demand — as they nearly have several times in recent years when summer heat pushed the system to its limits.

"There's a lot of finger pointing by politicians in Texas right now, but there's some very painful lessons for them in terms of the way their market is run," said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies. "One of the weaknesses of Texas is they're not connected very well to any other part of the country."

While the immediate focus there is restoring power across the state, some have started to look ahead to how the grid can prepare for the future.

"The one common element from the California situation and what appears to be the case in Texas, is weather," Richard Glick, chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told reporters Thursday. "All the experts tell us this type of wild unanticipated weather is going to happen much more frequently than has happened in the past. It's incumbent on us and others to ensure the grid is more resilient against those particular extreme weather events."

Glick questioned whether Texas should continue its go-it-alone approach, noting that nearby states with access to generation over transmission lines managed to recover more quickly from the deep freeze, including much of the upper Midwest and even El Paso and Lubbock, Texas, which operate outside Texas' primary network. That Midwest power network is managed by grid operators linked to the rest of the country and suffered rolling blackouts on Monday and Tuesday, but largely recovered by Wednesday.

Power grid experts have called for a massive build-out of transmission lines for decades to ensure that energy supply problems those suffered by California and Texas suffered could be alleviated by supplanting supplies from downed power plants with electricity from other parts of the country, or even from Canada and Mexico. That's an approach the Biden administration is likely to try to take, but they'll need to come up with a way to driving the billions or trillions of spending needed and figure out how to clear away the bureaucratic problems that have slowed the process for decades.

"The problem is not that transmission providers are looking for handouts," said Larry Gasteiger, executive director of WIRES, a transmission builders association. "If the transmission [needs are] identified and put into a transmission plan, we'll build it. Two real areas that are stumbling blocks for getting more transmission infrastructure built: One is permitting and siting, the other is cost allocation. Who pays for it."

Green groups generally agree that more transmission is needed — linking rural areas with lots of sun and wind with population centers will be key to decarbonizing the grid — but they don't think more wires will be the end of the process. Instead, they point to new technologies, like developing "microgrids" that are less reliant on distant power supplies and rolling out batteries that can store power for when it's needed.

"First and foremost, we need to recognize, we probably can't prevent every outage of this kind that we're probably going to be seeing over the next 30 years," said Mark Dyson, a principal for electric power with the clean energy think tank Rocky Mount Institute. "It's well past time to recognize a fundamental vulnerability of the power system and take advantage of where we are now with digital technologies, more distributed technology, storage, and flexibility and deal with the root cause and not play whack a mole with these large scale systems."

Republicans are unlikely to embrace an infrastructure bill laden with green energy incentives, such as the one Biden plans. But some conservatives argue that the bill could do a lot to make the energy grid more resilient to weather events.

"It looks like an infrastructure bill is likely to move and it will include energy provisions," said former Republican FERC Commissioner Bernard McNamee, now a partner at the law firm of McGuire Woods.

"I don't think this is going to be a one simple solution. It's going to be a lot of hard work, a lot of thinking by smart people to come up with practical solutions," he added.

 

DESPERATE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY Expert: Texas energy crisis, extreme weather underscore role for nuclear, balanced power mix

Brooke DiPalma

·Associate Producer

Fri, February 19, 2021, 1:51 PM

The energy crisis in Texas, which left millions without power and heat during a brutal stretch of freezing temperatures, has become the latest test of America's aging infrastructure, which has become a key policy focus of the Biden administration and Congress.

Dire headlines out of the Lone Star State "really underscored the importance of having a balanced mix" of energy sources, according to John Kotek, the Nuclear Energy Institute's (NEI) vice president of policy development and public affairs. He told Yahoo Finance Live that with redoubled focus on climate change, nuclear energy should be part of a conversation aimed at "decarboniz[ing] the grid."

According to Kotek, "we're going to need to take advantage of the positive attributes and compensate for some of the shortcomings of all energy resources," Kotek said, speaking about atomic power. 

"The fact that you've got 18 to 24 months of fuel supply in the reactor at any given time means that those facilities can run when maybe other energy resources are interrupted by things like extreme weather or other circumstances," he added.

In the midst of the shift toward renewables like wind and solar, nuclear power has found itself mostly on the outside looking in, sidelined by safety fears that make critics uneasy. However, proponents of atomic energy say risks of an accident or terrorism are "minimal" at best, and that the power source is more carbon-friendly than many available alternatives.

Kotek called the energy source the "most reliable resource we've had during this period of cold," stating that "nuclear has been running at greater than 95%" capacity throughout the entire country as a major weather system blankets most of the country in ice, snow and frigid temperatures.

KILLEEN, TEXAS - FEBRUARY 18: A tractor trailer is stuck in the slick ice and snow on State Highway 195 on February 18, 2021 in Killeen, Texas. Winter storm Uri has brought historic cold weather and power outages to Texas as storms have swept across 26 states with a mix of freezing temperatures and precipitation. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Currently, in Waynesboro, Georgia, construction for two Plant Vogtle's nuclear units are underway. The two new reactors are expected to provide "enough safe, reliable, affordable electricity to power 1 million Georgia homes and businesses."  

Kotek said the Department of Energy estimates that the carbon-free reactors will have a lifetime of more than 80 years, and "would keep about 800 million metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere."

However, he believe it's crucial that other efforts are made, in addition to nuclear energy, in order to succeed in decarbonizing energy. That includes "increasing shares of wind, solar and storage to get to a clean grid."

Kotek, who also was nominated by former President Barack Obama in October 2015 to serve as Assistant Energy Secretary for nuclear energy, is hopeful that the Biden-Harris administration will be "supportive of nuclear."

During the campaign, President Joe Biden recognized that "both existing nuclear and a next generation of nuclear technology [are] having an important role to play in decarbonizing the grid," Kotek said. 

He's optimistic that the new administration will "focus on keeping existing plants running, and then they'll focus on creating pathway for our next generation of nuclear technology."

Brooke DiPalma is a producer and reporter

VIDEO

Expert: Texas energy crisis, extreme weather underscore role for nuclear, balanced power mix (yahoo.com)

 

Texas shows need for infrastructure spending has 'never been greater': Engineering CEO

Brooke DiPalma

·Associate Producer

Sun, February 21, 2021, 8:47 AM

Extreme weather that's plunged much of the U.S. into the deep freeze — and put Texas failing energy infrastructure in the spotlight — underscores the dire need for federal infrastructure spending, the top executive of an professional services firm told Yahoo Finance.

On Saturday, President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in the Lone Star State after millions were left without water and electricity amid frigid temperatures. The crisis has prompted an "urgent need" for funding into America's infrastructure that's been a long time coming, according to Jacobs (J) CEO Steven J. Demetriou.

"Over the last 10 years, both sides of the aisle have been talking about the urgent need for infrastructure," said Demetriou, whose company is headquartered in Dallas Texas.

"There's a generational opportunity under the Biden administration to really move forward," the CEO added. "I think the desire is there, the climate change drivers, digital drivers, I think we're gonna see some movement here in 2021."

Texans were completely caught off guard as a winter storm knocked out power for millions, causing widespread pandemonium. Demetriou told Yahoo Finance the incident is eye-opening, and called Texas "only one example of these type of things that are happening across the country," underscoring an "urgent need" to fix the U.S.'s crumbling network of roads, bridges and energy systems.

"But that's only the beginning of the issues...cities and towns desperately need to modernize schools, upgrade and expand water infrastructure and many other services," he added, citing how extreme weather is exacerbating the problem.

"These crazy issues in Texas and across the globe...sea level rise in some cities, flooding, bushfires, the fact that throughout the United States....we are clearly at a stage where the need for federal infrastructure investment has never been greater," Demetriou added.

Not just 'throwing money' at the problem

(Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Outlined with 'The Biden Plan to Invest in Middle Class Competitiveness', the Biden administration calls for a $1.3 trillion investment in the country's infrastructure over ten years, "to equip the American middle class to compete and win in the global economy, to move the U.S. to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, and to ensure that cities, towns, and rural areas all across our country share in that growth."

Yet Demetriou emphasized that there's much more involved than "just throwing money at each of these individual issues."

He added: "It really creates an opportunity for a modern set of integrated economic, social and environmental strategies to drive infrastructure investment going forward. It's not about concrete and steel, it's more about connecting urban and suburban communities through multi-purpose infrastructure solutions."

The executive noted that when it comes to the economic impact of the average taxpayer, this issue "goes beyond the traditional economic measures" and is "about saving people's lives."

Shares of Jacobs are up nearly 11% from a year ago, with shares closing at $112.41 a share on Friday, February 19th's market close.

VIDEO 8:00 Texas shows need for infrastructure spending has 'never been greater': Engineering CEO (yahoo.com)