The Science and Philosophy Forum

El Paso Electric is part of the Western power grid overseen by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council. It covers 14 Western states; Northern Baja, Mexico; and two Canadian provinces. 

It made geographical sense for El Paso Electric to connect to the Western grid in Albuquerque about 60 years ago to bring in power from the Four Corners power plant in New Mexico. Later, additional connections were made in Arizona to bring power from the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, near Phoenix, which began operating in the 1980s, said Steven Buraczyk, senior vice president of operations.

El Paso Electric sold its interest in the coal-fired Four Corners plant and stopped getting power from it in 2016. About half its power comes from the Palo Verde plant, of which EPE is a part owner.

“It wouldn’t be cost effective to build hundreds of miles of high voltage power lines to connect to the Texas grid,” Buraczyk said.

Texas relies on natural gas more than any other fuel for its electricity generation. Gas generated nearly half of the state’s electricity in 2019, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Wind and coal each accounted for about 20 percent of electricity generation that year, while nuclear made up about another 10 percent. While nuclear and wind power have been hampered by the storm, neither frigid nuclear plants nor frozen wind turbines bear the largest share of responsibility for Texas’ power problems.

“It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system,” Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, said during a call with reporters on February 16th, the Texas Tribune reported.

While the frigid cold slashed fuel supplies of all sorts, it also drove up demand for natural gas to heat homes. That “mismatch” is what’s driving these blackouts, says Coombs. There simply hasn’t been enough fuel on hand to power the state’s electricity needs. Natural gas production was pretty much halved in Texas and its gas-rich Permian Basin during the recent cold and stormy weather. It fell from 22.5 billion cubic feet of gas produced per day in December to between 10 to 12 billion cubic feet of gas per day this week, according to estimates from BTU Analytics.

That drop-off in production is thanks to freeze-offs at wellheads where oil and gas are pumped out of the ground. But the cold has also stopped equipment from working properly at gas processing plants, Coombs says. Processing plants separate gas from fluid and impurities; when equipment freezes, plants have to heat it up or wait for temperatures to rise before they can resume their work.

While other states invest more in equipment that helps prevent freeze-offs, Texas hasn’t seen the need. North Dakota typically sees 20 days a year with freeze-off events, while the Permian Basin would normally have just four days a year with freeze-offs disrupting gas production, according to BTU Analytics.

“With gas prices being low – and storage being full – the risk of 2-3 days of possible freeze-off every several years is a risk that Gulf Coast producers have been willing to take,” a report on freeze-offs prepared for ERCOT in 2013 says.

If Texas renamed the power grid Universal Texas Electric Reliability and Utility System aka UTERUS, they’d regulate it