Why Texas’ mass power outages continue to happen

From Texas Tribune.

It’s become a familiar cycle: A powerful storm sweeps through a swath of Texas and takes the electric system down in its grip. Trees might bend and topple, crashing down onto a power pole. Sometimes the weight of ice pulls branches onto electric lines. Other times wind makes a wire spark, and that ember ignites a destructive blaze.

Thousands of Texans then sit in the dark for days — in either the blistering heat or frigid cold — waiting for utility crews to survey and fix the damage so electricity can start flowing again.

Such power outages are likely to continue.

That’s because the massive network of equipment that moves electricity across the state and then to individual Texas homes and businesses is unprepared for the severe weather expected in years ahead, experts say. Making it more resilient will require utilities to invest money to strengthen the system over time.

Texas had 210 weather-related power outages — more than any other state — from 2000 to 2023, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central that used power outage data from the U.S. Department of Energy.

As emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses continue to increase temperatures, severe weather disasters will worsen. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense, according to Climate Central. Warmer oceans fuel storms, causing hurricanes to likely be stronger. Days before Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the Texas coast July 8, it set records for its strength so early in the hurricane season.

Beryl made its way inland toward Houston as a Category 1 hurricane and knocked out power to more than 2.6 million customers — showing how vulnerable the grid’s infrastructure in Southeast Texas was to high winds. Hundreds of thousands of power customers still didn’t have the lights on more than a week after the storm as linemen worked to replace poles and broken equipment.

It was yet another period in recent years where massive outages left Texans without electricity.

A powerful windstorm in mid-May known as a derecho slammed the Houston region with 100-mile-per-hour winds, knocking out power for nearly 1 million customers in the so-called energy capital of the world. City officials, residents and utility companies were still trying to recover from the damage from that storm when Hurricane Beryl hit in July.

“It’s like the big, bad wolf: Huff and puff and blow the house down,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “And I don’t think any utility or city designs for weather like that, at least not weather that frequent.”