Originally Published: 12 JUL 24 11:44 ET
By Ella Nilsen, CNN
(CNN) — Keeping the power on can be the difference between life and death, a scenario bearing out this week in Houston as temperatures spike while hundreds of thousands of people suffer through brutal heat without air conditioning.
The city was struck by massive back-to-back storms: A powerful derecho in May blew out skyscraper windows and left downtown Houston dark. Then Category 1 Beryl swept through in an unusually early start to hurricane season, knocking out power for more than 2 million customers.
Texas’s electrical infrastructure can’t keep up. Downed trees and strong winds toppled neighborhood power lines, and the May derecho even felled some massive transmission towers, warping them into twisted metal.
But rather than shuttling money into strengthening its grid to make sure the lights and A/C stay on during increasingly extreme weather, Texas is pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into new natural gas-fired power plants.
Adding more electricity to the grid isn’t necessarily a bad thing because the state is facing higher demand, said Texas energy expert Doug Lewin, founder of consulting firm Stoic Energy. But flooding the energy grid with more planet-warming fossil fuels won’tmake power lines resilient to stronger storms.
“Large-scale gas generation doesn’t do anything for you in a situation like a hurricane,” Lewin told CNN. “The problem is transmission lines can’t carry that power. You could have all the power in the world; if you can’t get it to where it’s needed, it’s not going to do anybody any good.”
The move to build more natural gas plants came in the wake of another massive power outage: the deadly deep freeze in February 2021 killed more than 200 people and left millions of customers without power and heat for days. Despite Texas Republicans’ anti-wind energy rhetoric, natural gas plants going offline accounted for the bulk of theoutages.
More recently, mass outages have come from downed power lines.
“The weak point is the wires and poles, and basically always has been,” Michael Webber, an energy expert and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told CNN.“But it’s not a priority for the state. The state prioritizes natural gas power plants or backup natural gas generator systems. It is not focused on hardening the grid.”
Three months before Beryl slammed into Texas, Houston utility Centerpoint Energy estimated in an April report it would need $2 billion to harden its system against worsening extreme weather.
Centerpoint and other Texas utilities are no stranger to extreme weather. Since 2015, Houston alone has endured three hurricanes, two tropical storms, extreme heat and cold, flooding and the rare May derecho with tornado-like winds. Centerpoint worked to restore power after 15 extreme weather events between 2019 to 2023.
“In addition to extreme weather, the company’s service area also experiences heavy precipitation and extreme temperatures,” the company wrote in the report. “Many of the resiliency measures in the company’s resiliency plan will address and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather-related resiliency events.”
Back-to-back storms have taken a toll on electrical infrastructure – particularly old wooden electrical poles, Joshua Rhodes, an energy research scientist at UT Austin, told CNN.
“This is the third major event that has hit the region; that just takes a toll with infrastructure,” Rhodes said.“If another storm comes through, that can take out more infrastructure that wasn’t fully fixed from the other storm.”
Much of Texas’s electrical infrastructure was built in the 1970s and 1980s, when weather was less extreme, Rhodes said, and many of the electrical poles are made of wood. That wood is getting more brittle with extreme heat, followed by floods. And as Texas is now hit with storm after storm, that is taking a toll.
“It’s not a surprise the infrastructure built for milder weather is failing more often,” Rhodes said. Some utilities are starting to replace wooden poles with stronger fiberglass materials; some are contemplating burying electrical lines underground, which is an expensive process.
Some experts CNN spoke to pointed to another factor among Texas officials: A lack of willingness to talk about a dramatically warming climate and how it is fueling stronger storms.
State officials required utilities like Centerpoint to submit weather resilience plans but haven’t doled out much money to help them make the fixes.
“Since the Texas political leadership doesn’t admit to climate change, (utilities) can talk about extreme weather, but they can’t say extreme weather is being exacerbated by climate change, it’s going to get worse and we to plan to get ahead of it,” said Alison Silverstein, an independent energy consultant based in Texas. “All this stuff costs money, and customers are the ones who pay for it.”
Lewin stressed that one solution is microgrids powered by both solar and natural gas – smaller networks of power infrastructure separate from the main grid, which can be used to power nursing homes and hospitals during a major event like a hurricane.
Microgrids did receive more than $1 billion in state funding in the samebill as the gas plants – money that Lewin said has been sitting dormant at the Texas Public Service Commission, not yet able to be applied for.
“We’ve got to make sure that 90-year-olds have power when it’s 105 degrees out – period,” Lewin said. “That’s just mission critical. Anything less than 100% success is not okay.”
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