Houston Chronicle by Chris Tomlinson 2/24/2021
Tomlinson: Texans must understand blackout before overhauling electric grid
COVID-19 killed half a million Americans in less than a year. Blackouts left four million Texas homes without electricity on the coldest four nights in decades. Thirteen million Texans were left without running, potable water.
Poet William Butler Yeats had seen something similar in 1919 following World War I and the Spanish flu and wrote “The Second Coming.â€
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.â€
Today, provocateurs are stoking division and hatred with disinformation. Most of us are scrambling to explain what went wrong. Yet others see nothing more than an inconvenient anomaly. Then, there are those who want to burn it all down.
To recover, restore and improve our lives, businesses and economies, we must move with deliberation and humility, two things our culture does not seem to value at the moment.
Our society is built on energy, and millions of Texans, who had never heard of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or the people on the Public Utility Commission, have learned what happens when “things fall apart.â€
We need to learn why 185 powerplants tripped offline in a matter of hours. The breadth of the failure suggests a catastrophic fault in our system. We presume our generators were not prepared for such a winter storm, but we don’t know all the facts.
Texas regulators’ light touch and the state’s independence from national interconnections were supposed to be features of our system, not bugs. Would weatherization and expanding our capacity to import and export energy solve our problems? Maybe.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Texans-must-understand-blackout-before-15975044.php