How unprecedented was the February 2021 Texas cold snap?
James Doss-Gollin6,1
, David J Farnham2, Upmanu Lall3,4 and Vijay Modi5
Published 8 June 2021 • © 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
Winter storm Uri brought severe cold to the southern United States in February 2021, causing a cascading failure of interdependent systems in Texas where infrastructure was not adequately prepared for such cold. In particular, the failure of interconnected energy systems restricted electricity supply just as demand for heating spiked, leaving millions of Texans without heat or electricity, many for several days. This motivates the question: did historical storms suggest that such temperatures were known to occur, and if so with what frequency? We compute a temperature-based proxy for heating demand and use this metric to answer the question 'what would the aggregate demand for heating have been had historic cold snaps occurred with today's population?'. We find that local temperatures and the inferred demand for heating per capita across the region served by the Texas Interconnection were more severe during a storm in December 1989 than during February 2021, and that cold snaps in 1951 and 1983 were nearly as severe. Given anticipated population growth, future storms may lead to even greater infrastructure failures if adaptive investments are not made. Further, electricity system managers should prepare for trends in electrification of heating to drive peak annual loads on the Texas Interconnection during severe winter storms.
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Supplementary data
1. Introduction
Between February 14th and 17th, 2021, a northern air mass blanketed much of the continental United States, causing anomalously low surface temperatures across the Great Plains. The state of Texas was particularly hard hit, with coincident and cascading failures of natural gas production, power generation, transportation, and water systems leaving millions of Texans without electricity, heat, and water, many for several days [1–3]. These failures disproportionately affected vulnerable populations [4], left at least 111 Texans dead [5], and brought the Texas electricity grid within minutes of collapse [6].
Since production and distribution of electricity is possible under conditions far colder than any Texas experienced in February 2021, energy system failures reflect inadequate preparedness for cold. These failures occurred both because electricity demand exceeded projections, and because electricity supply failed to meet them. On the demand side, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the Texas Interconnection bulk electric power system (hence 'Texas Interconnection'), estimated that the peak demand would have been 76 819 MW without load shedding [6]. This surpassed ERCOT's 'extreme winter forecast' of 67 208 MW in its seasonal assessment of resource adequacy [7]. On the supply side, the Texas Interconnection experienced over 30 000 MW of lost output for two consecutive days due to outages and derates caused by cold temperatures [8]. A large fraction of this supply shortfall, which exceeded ERCOT's worst-case scenario for forced outages, originated in the natural gas supply chain [1, 3, 8].
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac0278
