Federal energy regulators recommended more stringent cold-weather standards for power plants and natural-gas supply networks after investigating the blackouts that crippled Texas during a freeze in February.
In a preliminary report released Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the nonprofit organization that helps set best practices for utilities, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., outlined the reasons for the cascading failures that left millions of people in Texas without power for days, and led to more than 200 deaths.
The report identified power plant failures as the single most significant cause of the outages, which were most sweeping in Texas but also occurred in parts of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Natural-gas supply issues were the second-largest cause, the report found, in part because most production and processing facilities weren’t identified as critical functions and therefore went offline when utilities cut power to many areas at the direction of the grid operator. Such interdependent power and gas systems need to better coordinate, the report said.
“In this day and age we have people that froze to death because of power outages. That is beyond unacceptable,” FERC Chairman Richard Glick said. “The situation didn’t need to be as bad as it was.”
“‘In this day and age we have people that froze to death because of power outages. That is beyond unacceptable.’”
The Wall Street Journal reported in February that a lack of winterization standards was a primary culprit in the Texas blackouts. A severe storm paralyzed every type of energy source in the state, from natural gas-fired power plants to wind turbines, in part because their owners hadn’t made the investments needed to produce electricity in subfreezing temperatures.
A subsequent Journal investigation in May found that some natural-gas facilities in Texas were paid to go offline as part of a state program that compensates large industrial power users for reducing their consumption during emergencies. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, didn’t know who was being paid to participate in this program and what type of facilities were getting shut off.
Thursday’s report wasn’t the first time that FERC and NERC had recommended tougher winterization standards for power plants. A report issued after a February 2011 freeze in Texas shut down about half the state’s generating capacity also sounded a warning about cold weather preparation, but its recommendations were reduced to guidelines that weren’t followed by most generators.
Millions of people in Texas went without power for days in February.
Photo: Chris Rusanowsky/Zuma Press
Texas went on to have power system reliability problems during cold snaps in 2014 and 2018, in addition to this year’s blackouts, the report noted.
“I guarantee you that this time FERC will not permit these recommendations to be ignored or watered down,” Mr. Glick said.
FERC has limited authority over the Texas power grid, which is largely disconnected from the rest of the country and thus not under federal control, but NERC can set enforceable reliability standards.
Texas regulators have been working to make changes to the design of the state’s power market, which operates as the nation’s only pure “energy only” electricity market, one in which producers are paid just for the power they sell, not the ability to deliver on demand. All other deregulated electricity markets in the U.S. offer generators some form of payment for being ready to produce power whenever it is needed.
The FERC report called for further study of several issues, including better connecting the largely isolated Texas grid with other states and Mexico, which were able to send only limited amounts of power to Texas during the storm.
“I’ve thought for years that depending on an energy-only market for resource adequacy is really an accident waiting to happen, and it happened in February,” FERC Commissioner Mark Christie said. The issues go well beyond winterizing equipment to how states make sure they have sufficient power generation, he said.
Mr. Glick pushed back on politicians who blamed the Texas outages on wind and solar power.
“Today’s report makes it clear that the facts just don’t support this rhetoric,” he said, adding that all forms of electric generation had problems and all should have been winterized.
The report recommends that power-plant owners be able to recover the costs for winterizing, and that Congress or states require natural-gas facilities to plan and prepare for deep freezes, given the grid’s dependence on natural-gas production and delivery for power generation.
A final report outlining the recommendations is expected by this winter.
Write to Jennifer Hiller at [email protected] and Katherine Blunt at [email protected]
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