We Need To Dispel the Myth That Fossil Fuel Power Plants Are Reliable
Building more fossil fuel power plants will make our grid less, not more, reliable.
Two years ago, a polar vortex caused the electric grid in Texas to fail, leading to hundreds of deaths. Before the storm was even over, Republican leaders in the state took to cable TV and social media to point fingers at renewable energy.
Gov. Greg Abbott told Sean Hannity, “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” Another state official quipped on Facebook, “We should never build another wind turbine in Texas.”
It wasn’t just Texas politicians and pundits weighing in on the disaster though. “This is a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources like natural gas & coal,” said Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines.
On social media, images of frozen wind turbines went viral despite the fact they were taken in Sweden 7 years before and had nothing to do with Texas.
These news segments and social media posts reached millions of Americans. But they were all based on a lie.
Seven months after the blackouts, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) released the definitive report on what happened in Texas. They concluded that fossil fuels, not renewables, caused the electric grid failure. According to the report, natural gas fuel supply issues were responsible for 87% of the outages.
Nevertheless, the fossil fuel industry and their allies continued to push the narrative that renewables were to blame for the disaster in Texas.
A month after FERC released its report, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin justified not voting for Build Back Better and its historic climate investments by saying a rapid transition to clean energy would “have catastrophic consequences for the American people like we have seen in both Texas and California in the last two years.”
But this myth hasn’t just misled people into believing that renewables are unreliable; it’s also led the public and lawmakers into believing the similarly false idea that fossil fuel power is reliable.
Fossil fuel infrastructure has a history of failing in extreme weather
The disaster in Texas is one of the most famous examples of failing fossil fuel infrastructure, but it’s far from the only one.
Just a few months ago, on Christmas weekend, 1.7 million people lost power when temperatures plummeted across the country. Immediately following the storm, the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board ran a story arguing that “the government’s force-fed green energy transition” was to blame.
Again, the data said otherwise.
In their initial post-mortem report, PJM, the country’s largest grid operator, said gas power plants accounted for 70% of the outages; coal accounted for another 23%. Wind and solar, on the other hand, performed as expected.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon. In 2014, a polar vortex swept through the country and again fossil fuel infrastructure failed. Coal-fired power plants and their on-site coal piles froze up. Gas-fired power plants were caught without the necessary supply to operate at full capacity. Fuel oil froze in trucks and valves. All across the country, fossil fuel power plants failed to deliver electricity as expected.
“Over and over again in these extreme weather events, fossil fuels have been forecasted to perform well and don’t show up,” Christy Walsh, a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council, told me.
It’s not just extreme cold causing fossil fuel infrastructure to fail. Last summer, 12,000 megawatts of gas and coal generation—enough to power 2.4 million homes—went offline during a heat wave in Texas. Meanwhile, solar power over-performed and ultimately prevented widespread blackouts.
“Grid operators assume that 100% of gas and coal is going to show up.” Walsh, who spent nearly two decades working at FERC before joining NRDC, said. “We’re just seeing that’s not true.”
How to build a more resilient grid
According to Walsh, phasing out fossil fuels and deploying a diverse portfolio of clean energy technologies is one of the best ways to build a more resilient grid.
In addition to being unreliable, fossil fuels are also the cause of many of the extreme weather events stressing the grid in the first place. Heat waves, like the one that stressed the Texas grid last summer, are now three times more common than they were in the 1960s. Counterintuitively, there’s even evidence that Arctic warming may be making polar vortexes and extreme winter weather more common.
“We need to get off the fossil fuels that are actually causing climate change,” Walsh said.
Much of the technology needed to phase out fossil fuels—like wind and solar—is ready to be deployed at scale. Getting more of this technology on the grid would also save people money. According to a recent report, it’s now cheaper to build new wind and solar projects than operate 99% of existing coal power plants.
But deploying renewables alone won’t make the grid more resilient. As solar and wind critics love to point out, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.
In the short term, lithium-ion battery storage can help solve some of these problems. For example, at night when wind energy production is high and power demand is low, electricity can be stored in batteries. Then when demand goes back up, that electricity can be delivered to customers.
Here again economics are in clean energy’s favor. Lithium-ion battery prices have fallen by 97% over the last three decades. According to BloombergNEF, batteries are now cheaper than most of the fossil fuel power plants used to generate quick bursts of power at times of high electricity demand.
But lithium-ion batteries, which make up the vast majority of the electricity storage market, have their problems. In addition to being made from minerals that are currently mined in socially and environmentally harmful ways, these batteries can only hold 4-6 hours of electricity. A 100% clean grid will require much longer term storage options.
Like many other clean energy technologies the energy storage market is changing quickly though. Last month Xcel Energy, one of the largest utilities in the country, announced a new long duration storage project powered by iron-air batteries. A spokesperson for Xcel told the Colorado Sun that the project is cost-competitive with their existing coal plants.
Walsh told me that one of the best opportunities to improve the grid and reduce emissions is to build more transmission infrastructure.
Being able to transport clean energy longer distances would enable grid operators to take advantage of the diversity of weather in America. For example, if one region was experiencing extreme heat and high demand for air conditioning, power producers in a more mild region of the country could send their excess power there.
This exact scenario played out last summer when power producers in relatively mild Washington State sent electricity to consumers in California during a heat wave. The problem is that in America we don’t have many long distance transmission lines like the ones connecting Washington and California. To build a clean, reliable grid, we’ll need a lot more of these lines.
Another effective way to improve reliability is to scale up demand response programs.
Last summer, California proved that asking consumers to use less electricity during peak demand can save the grid. During a September heat wave, California’s grid operator, CAISO, was about to begin rolling blackouts. But just before cutting power, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services sent a text message asking people to conserve power. Demand fell by just under 4%, which was enough to prevent any blackouts.
Technically this wasn’t a demand response program since consumers voluntarily reduced their power use, but Walsh says its results can be extrapolated to a program where people get paid to cut power.
There’s no shortage of technology and policy options that would make the grid cleaner and more reliable. More energy efficient appliances; smart water heaters that pre-heat to avoid using electricity during peak demand; updated FERC transmission rules; all of this would make people around the country less vulnerable to deadly blackouts.
But implementing these solutions will be difficult if we aren’t clear that building more fossil fuel power plants will make our grid less, not more, reliable.