It wasn’t that long ago when bitterly cold temperatures were caused by sudden warming in the Arctic air. Arctic amplification from global warming weakened the polar vortex, a collection of winds that keep cold temperatures in the Arctic.
As power outages, residents in survival mode were reduced to boiling snow for drinking, struggled to find warmth inside their homes, and hundreds died from hypothermia in their beds.
Today, rising temperatures amplified by the climate crisis threaten residents once again with unseasonable temperatures after six power plant generators failed this past Friday. The operator of the Texas grid pleaded with the public to conserve power.
After early spring heatwaves cover the state, warmer temperatures will test power generation as another abnormal heatwave arrives early next week.
The power-plant failures resulted in a loss of about 2,900 megawatts of electricity, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in an email statement Friday. That’s enough power for about 580,000 homes and businesses. Natural-gas fired plants make up all of the generation that failed, an Ercot spokesman said.
The Texas grid is being stressed by high heat in a potential preview of peak summertime demand. This summer will test whether Ercot has made sufficient changes to reinforce a system that experienced cascading power-plant failures and deadly blackouts during a historic freeze in early 2021.
On Thursday, the Public Utility Commission of Texas expressed concern that generators haven’t had enough time to perform seasonal maintenance ahead of summer. The risk: summertime maintenance amid stronger heat can lead to supply shortages and potentially rolling blackouts.
The spring maintenance season typically ends in late May, but outages this year will likely slip into the first half of June, said Michele Richmond, executive director of Texas Competitive Power Advocates, a generator industry group.
Texas is already experiencing heat. The high in Houston on Friday reached 92 degrees Fahrenheit (33.3 degrees Celsius), six degrees above average, according to AccuWeather. Widespread heat is expected to intensify over the weekend and next week, according to Ercot. Highs of 95 to 105 degrees will be common next week, with places in West Texas reaching 110 degrees.
The heatwave will be moving into the central and North Eastern regions of the United States. This heatwave will rewrite the record books in those areas.
After baking the state of Texas, an early-season heat wave is poised to shatter temperature records across the central and Northeastern sections of the United States in the next few days.
Unusually hot weather, with temperatures expected to top 100 degrees Fahrenheit throughout a broad stretch of the country, will affect millions of Americans from Texas to Maine and serve as yet another wake-up call as to the mounting evidence of climate change.
"The heat wave will produce temperatures that are 15-25 degrees above average. In most cases, temperatures this high have not been experienced since September or August last year," AccuWeather said on its website.
On Saturday, heat records were toppled in the Texas cities Del Rio, San Angelo and Abilene, with the thermometer registering 112 degrees in some locations. At the weekend, San Antonio notched its earliest consecutive 100-degree days on record, the Weather Channel reported. The oppressive heat has been exacerbated by stifling humidity.
"Not only will high humidity result in increased discomfort during the day, but unusually warm nights that are also more typical for July," Dan DePodwin, head of AccuWeather's forecasting operations, said.
As the heat wave pushed north and east from the Great Plains, daytime temperatures in cities like Chicago were hotter than those recorded in Death Valley, Calif.
The weather is fine - clear, warm and sunny as it tends to be in mid-May. But the grid, managed by a quasi-agency with the word “Reliability” somewhat ironically contained in its name (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), most definitely is not so fine. Friday evening, ERCOT was forced for the second time this non-summer month to warn Texans of a potential shortage of capacity on the grid after 6 power generation facilities totaling 2,900 MWH tripped offline for unspecified reasons.
Such a warning in those months would have been basically a shoulder-shrugging moment. But in May, on a day when the weather was not noticeably unseasonably warm? This does not bode well for the summer season ahead.
We shouldn’t blame ERCOT entirely for Texans’ new, unstable electricity reality. After all, they’re basically just the messengers, communicating the results of long-term public policy malfeasance committed by politicians and their appointees. As I have pointed out repeatedly here since last year’s Big Freeze event in February, when the grid massively failed during Winter Storm Uri and more than 200 of my fellow Texans died as a result, the chronic issues that have caused this rising level of instability have been well-known to every responsible official in Austin and every corporation that pushes generating capacity onto the grid since at least 2011.
Those chronic issues have been allowed to persist for more than 11 years now, since the grid produced massive failures during a similar freeze event in early February 2011. Following last year’s fatal freeze, Texas legislators acted to address some of those long-known problems, but failed enact language that would create incentives to build additional dispatchable thermal reserve capacity powered by natural gas. The lack of such capacity is well-known, and the system as it is currently configured no longer produces the needed market signals for corporations to invest in building more of it.
Beto (Donate) should runon the incompetence and climate denial of the MAGA-controlled state.