Could it happen here? What New York can learn from the power outages in Texas
By: Dan Propp
Matt Miller was 22 when Superstorm Sandy hit New York, knocking out the power for eight million people. “I had to navigate around my apartment with my cell phone,” he recalled. “Being in a city, it’s never really dark. So when Sandy hit and it went true pitch black it was very surreal.”
The sight of Lower Manhattan shrouded in darkness prompted soul-searching about the fragility of the electric grid. In the year that followed, conversations abounded about what should be done to prevent such an event from happening in the future. Elected officials and New York residents alike demanded to know how the power system had failed so thoroughly.
So Miller and other New Yorkers felt a sense of empathy last month when a weather anomaly plunged much of Texas into darkness. Between February 14 and 19, a winter storm left 4.5 million Texans without power and at least 58 dead. For many, it would be almost a week before power returned.
In the weeks since the disaster, the causes of the power failure have come into clearer focus. Much of the blame has been laid at the feet of regulators and power plant operators who were unprepared for such weather. But a deeper inquest into the events of February suggests that the causes of the outage may not be so uniquely Texan after all.
How Texas went dark
What went wrong in Texas? The list is extensive, but it starts with winter weather far harsher than what Texans are accustomed to. On February 13, temperatures fell to 5 degrees Fahrenheit, a full fifty degrees colder than the average February day. With residents rushing to turn on their heaters, electricity demand soared above 69,000 MW, a winter record for the state. At the same time, the power plants that Texas relied on to meet this demand began to fail. A nuclear plant in Bay City shut down when its water intake froze. A wind turbine in Abilene stopped spinning when ice formed on the blades. Natural gas plants, which supply more than half of Texas’ electricity, stopped operating as frozen wells shut off their fuel supply. All told, more than 30,000 MW – a quarter of Texas’ generating capacity – went offline at a time when demand was skyrocketing.
The chief job of a power grid operator is to ensure that electricity supply meets demand at all times. In another state, the grid operator might have mitigated this supply gap by importing electricity from other states where power plants were still functioning. But no such option was available in Texas, which operates its own grid independent of the rest of the country. So the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Texas’ grid operator, took emergency action to prevent greater damage to the grid – it shut off power to millions of customers.
Texans found themselves struggling to stay warm without electricity. “When the power went out, all the places selling firewood immediately sold out,” Jeffrey Fastow, a Houston resident, recalled. “We had to ration our firewood and there was a serious concern over how we were going to stay warm. It was scary.”
He wasn’t alone; Texans across the state found themselves layering up, sleeping in their cars, and even burning furniture in a desperate bid to ward off the winter chill.
The dire situation Texans found themselves in was, in many ways, the result of political decisions. To Kirsten Smith, a power sector expert at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy, Texas’ vulnerability stemmed from the way regulators allocated risk. “In Texas you’re asking generators to spend a ton of money to prepare for an event that may happen once in a decade,” Smith said. “The philosophy of the regulator is that the generator is better equipped to make that decision than the regulator.”
ERCOT relies on generating companies to essentially police their own resiliency. If supplying power in times of need is sufficiently lucrative, the thinking goes, power plant operators will find it in their best interests to spend money on weatherization. “Other states have different weatherization standards because they’re more used to this weather,” Smith added.
February’s events may cause Texans to rethink that decision. In doing so, they will find themselves asking the same question New Yorkers did in 2012: what is protection against blackouts worth?
The next storm
After Superstorm Sandy, the State of New York spent almost a billion dollars on flood walls and microgrids to reduce the likelihood of system-wide failure in the future. Likewise, Con Edison (New York’s largest utility) undertook a four-year weather resiliency program that included installing underground electric wires and raising substations.
So is New York safe from the outages that befell Texas? Shivaz Chopra, the New York Power Authority’s (NYPA) Director of Reliability Standards and Compliance, believes the state is on the right track. “In the northeast, systems are designed so they can operate in extremely cold conditions,” he says, “and utility maintenance practices account for that.”
Unlike in Texas, the New York grid is interconnected and has more bandwidth to deal with frequency deviations. The power plants in New York are also subject to regional reliability standards in addition to the continent-wide standards. Chopra explains that in New York the energy system is planned, designed and operated with reliability and resiliency in mind.
Cheryl LaFleur, the former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, sees few of the causes of the Texas outages here in New York. “Unlike Texas, New York shares a grid with the eastern half of the country,” LaFleur pointed out.
Consumers in New York also benefit from federal oversight over energy reliability, something Texas shuns. “But whether or not the specifics of what happened in Texas could occur in here,” LaFleur cautioned, “there are definitely lessons for New York when it comes to system reliability.”
Chief among these lessons is that extreme weather can exploit vulnerabilities in the power system. And vulnerabilities certainly exist in New York. Ten major power plants in New York sit four or fewer feet above the local high tide; during Sandy, the storm tide rose 14 feet. The average age of a transmission line is 25 years; the average transformer, 40. Rotting and corrosion on these pieces of equipment make them more likely to fail when extreme weather puts them under stress.
Correcting these vulnerabilities costs money. And it will be customers who foot the bill. Like most utilities, Con Edison operates through “cost of service recovery,” meaning any money the company spends on resiliency measures will be passed through to the customers in the form of higher electric bills. In essence, New Yorkers would be purchasing an insurance policy: higher monthly payments now to mitigate disaster in the future.
So New Yorkers face the same philosophical question Texans faced: what price are they willing to pay for resiliency? The temperatures that occurred last month in Texas were seen by many in the industry as outside the realm of the probable. Protecting against these conditions would have cost consumers money, so many happily accepted inexpensive energy bills rather than pay for protection against an event they deemed impossible. Similarly, protecting the grid against another Superstorm Sandy means insuring against a 1-in-700-year event. “We don’t have enough money to insure against every possible event,” LaFleur said. “So it’s a question of, what events are so improbable that we’re willing to risk vulnerability to them?”
The parameters of this question are changing even as regulators reckon with it. A study in the journal Nature Climate Change projected that what was previously considered a “one-in-500- year storm” in New York could occur every 50 to 240 years by the end of the century. The same time period could see sea levels rise 11 to 75 inches and heat waves triple in frequency. With climate change accelerating, the past is no longer an adequate guide when it comes to anticipating extreme weather.
This poses a challenge to regulators, whose job it is to understand risk. With extreme weather becoming ever more common, what may seem an unrealistic scenario today becomes realistic tomorrow. Risk-reward calculations face the prospect of becoming outdated as soon as soon as the ink dries. With an ever-changing risk profile, the task of resiliency planning becomes akin to hitting a moving target.
NYPA, at least, is not blind to the challenge of a changing climate. The authority is undertaking a climate resiliency study to understand what measures will be necessary to protect its assets in the face of a changing climate. According to Adrienne Lotto, NYPA’s Chief Risk and Resilience Officer, such proactive measures are necessary. “This will help us figure out what we should be planning for in terms of climate uncertainties, especially when it comes to our generation and transmission assets,” Lotto said.
But understanding the climate risk and deciding how heavily to weigh it against added costs for consumers are two different questions. “Are they ok with seeing slightly higher power prices throughout the year in order to avoid a breakdown in the future, or would they prefer to accept some risk?” Smith asked. Here in New York, it remains an open question.