The Texas Freeze and the distribution of risk
Stacked vulnerabilities show the long road to sustainable power for all
A social scientist walks into bar. Says to the other patron: "Say, have you heard about the Texas Freeze?". Says the patron, "Yeah of course, it was all over the news a couple of weeks ago. It was damn near inescapable!" Goes the social scientist: "Ah. Well. Want me to analyze it for you?"
Today I'd like to discuss the Texas blackouts and its implications by holding it to the bright lights of the big science of energy transitions in Texas and beyond. Here's what you'll read today:
When Texas froze over (a recap just in case you did manage to escape the news)
Wind energy is well on its way in part because fracking is, well, frakked up
The ill effects of fracking are unevenly distributed
The ill effects exist in part because of the lack of robust rural governance
Absence of strong regulation might mean that the costs and benefits of wind are going to be unevenly distributed as well
Fully renewable grids do present real management problems, the onus of which might fall on simple southern folk (on high-falutin’ northern folk too)
Texas Freeze
The quickest way to understand the technical part of the story is this Guardian explainer.
If you don't feel like reading at all though, check out Climate Town's acerbic-as-ever video report.
(Vox also has an accessible-as-ever explainer, which basically covers the same ground as Climate Town, minus the wit.)
If, however, you want to really understand the political economy of the disaster, read Kate Aranoff's deep dive. (Quick version quickly: Texan electricity runs through an entirely independent ERCOT grid, which I had always just taken as a quaint carry-over from the early and messy days of electricity, but which was actually created to keep federal regulators at bay, enabling the deregulation galore decade of the 1990s and the subsequent lack of upkeep.)
The gist of the matter:
It got very cold in Texas because of the polar vortex. This is not the first time this happened.
Despite the trouble extreme cold had caused in the past, utilities and energy companies across the board failed to weatherize their infrastructure.
As demand for energy went up (to heat cold buildings) overpowered generators went down nearly causing grid wide collapse.
Since the Texan grid is not connected to other North American grids, Texas couldn't get any neighbourly assistance.
So to prevent disastrous collapse, ERCOT's only recourse was to proactively shut down large swaths of the grid. These blackouts were unequally distributed, hitting black and Hispanic neighbourhood more.
That's not because ERCOT regulators are racist, but because racism is systemic, that is, baked into the system (thus some more affluent white neighbourhoods were spared from a blackout because they were also home to a hospital that couldn't go offline).
In the cold that ensued, a lot of infrastructure in and outside the home got damaged which prevented everything from coming back online after the initial, critical divergence of supply and demand was over. This left people without power in the freezing cold for days.
Oh, and certain prominent conservative voices and politicians blamed the whole thing on wind turbines in order to discredit the Green New Deal, in other words, wagering the fate of life on the planet for a little political gain, a move so spectacularly cynical it's making me cynical about humanity.
Alright, so now you're all caught up. Happy Monday, folks.
Now, let's do some social science.
Climate change as threat multiplier of existing risks
Climate change increases vulnerable people’s vulnerability as ‘natural’ and ‘social’ threats interact and refract in new ways. This idea will serve as a theme as we look at the (possible) implications of the Texas Freeze.
Energy Poverty
We already saw that the blackouts and their fallout hit poor and black and Hispanic neighbourhoods more than others. The freeze can have longer lasting impacts on people living with energy poverty though. Because the amount of energy it takes to heat up a home is much larger than to keep it at a base temperature, people are facing significantly higher energy bills. If people had a contract with variable tariffs, the effect would only be stronger, because they'd have to heat their houses back up when prices are higher because of the failing supply. (This was experienced to the extreme by people who had signed contracts for 'cheap' variable wholesale electricity prices with Griddy, receiving bills of up to the thousands.) Such sudden expenses can cripple shoestring household budgets, cascading into debt.
If we take the perspective of even longer term, that of the transition to a renewable energy system, we see that already 23% of Texan electricity comes from wind, so the transition is in full swing there. What does this transition look like through the perspective of risk?
Fracking
In environmental justice terms, one can argue that communities whose livelihood is most strongly linked to fossil fuel extraction should be at the front of the line of renewable energy investments - they stand the most to lose. (For many EU policymakers, the Polish coal region Silesia is therefore a litmus test for the Just Transition component of the Green Deal.)
In Texas, natural gas is big, so yes, in theory, there’s a lot to lose, but with fracking though, it’s… complicated. Only few people have unequivocally benefited from fracking’s great flight in the US. The story of fracking is also a story of relative vulnerability.
We've already talked about the boom and bust cycle that leaves towns in the dust after mining companies leave, with the town often very little to show for in terms of development. Ideally therefore, towns carefully examine risks and opportunities that extraction would bring to a town, in order to protect themselves from harm and harness the economic activity to their advantage (see Schafft et al 2019). But it's questionable whether small towns would ever be capable of doing that, not in the least given the amount of crap that fracking sites can produce.
Thus, Colter Ellis and colleagues (2016) talked to South Texan residents who reported "increased truck traffic, food and housing insecurity, flaring of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) gas, and concerns about water contamination [through] illegal dumping" (91). The effects of flaring and pollution in particular can be devastating, as you can read in this New Yorker report that just came out.
However, the authors also note that "rural city and county governments lack the resources ... to adequately anticipate, understand, and organize responses to many of the unintended social, health and environmental impacts associated with rapid energy booms" (92).
Now, again, the risks that towns contend with are unevenly distributed. The variation, for example in the amount of flaring, depends, as Katherine Ann Willyard (2020) shows, on the technical and geological specificities of the site, but it also correlates with the marginality of surrounding population.
Wind turbines
Given this history, in other words, renewables might not sound so bad to many Texans.
A survey of Texans by Jeffrey Swoffold and Michael Slattery from over a decade ago (2010) bears this out. They found little opposition to wind farms. Even half of people who were sceptical about climate change didn't oppose them. Caring about one's environment and its preservation also didn't seem to predispose most people against wind farms. Proximity to a site did increase overall opposition, but not enough to back up the ol’ NIMBY hypothesis.
That was in 2010. With the increasing visibility of the environmental and health costs of fracking, "clean energy" may take on a whole new meaning for folks in shale country.
However, the experience with fracking might also make people suspicious of new developments coming to their area, even if it is ‘clean’.
Green New Grids
For as dirty as fracking and other extractive techniques might inherently be, grid scale renewable infrastructure still has the problem of generally being pushed by Big Money. In that sense, rural towns might find themselves in the same position as they were with the incoming miners - insufficiently capable of harnessing the benefits for the local community and mitigating the risks. In fact, scholars have a name for states and private actors swooping in on the land of rural communities and ‘mining’ it for wind: aeolian extractivism. (See this SLE edition for Jaume Franquesa’s account of this in Spain.)
So there might be hopes of wind replacing gas as rural investments, but in order not to disappoint these expectations, Texas would need a different political economy of the grid: strong regulation from relevant authorities, to make sure surrounding communities benefit.
Then there is the instability that renewables bring. To make sure the grid can handle the variability of supply, it needs upgrading (the very thing that Texan operators were hoping to minimize) and it most likely needs variable pricing in order to enable business models that make energy demand as flexible as supply is variable. It’s far from clear such business models will be evenly benevolent, potentially producing continuous mini Griddy effects for certain customers.
Another strategy to build in resilience on the sustainable grid is microgrids, as a way of putting power into community hands (like this plea at Vox). Microgrids could protect their customers from rolling blackouts. But who will have the capital to invest in the infrastructure necessary to create a safe, reliable (semi-detached) microgrid?
So, what I’m saying, for a Green New Deal to deliver on its promise of reliable and affordable power for everyone, it’s not enough to enable investments in renewable technology; those investment have to come with a new regulatory package as well. Now, I’m not saying that GND advocates are staring themselves blind on turbines and panels, but there is a risk. It will be easier to push for renewables, because it now makes economic sense for many people. But pro-active support for poor areas and strong protective regulation will be much harder to pass and get right, and without it, the green grid of the future will be as racist and classist as the current one.
OK. Before entering pundit territory, I should probably take my bow. I’ll leave you with a song the story of which is wholly in Texas’ rebel spirit but whose moral provokes a meditation on the wisdom of erecting borders.
I hope y’all have a good week ahead of you.
Best wishes,
Marten
PS Well, let me add two bonus quotes about turbines.
The positive acceptance of wind power is largely based on public attitudes regarding the benefits of wind energy, while the negative opposition of wind power is largely based on public attitudes regarding the negative aspects of wind turbines. (Krohn and Damburg paraphrased in Swofford & Slattery, p. 2514)
Bill McKibben recently put these objections into perspective:
The idea that "windmills cause cancer was adopted by Donald Trump from NIMBY opponents of turbines, even though the medical evidence is clear that windmills don’t cause harm. (Just as it is clear that particulate pollution from fossil fuels now accounts for nearly one in five deaths worldwide, ahead of H.I.V./AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.) Yes, wind turbines kill birds—perhaps a quarter of a million every year in the United States, compared with the 6.8 million that die after colliding with cell-phone and radio towers and the billions that succumb to domestic cats. (And, if we keep raising the temperature on the current trajectory, two-thirds of American bird species will be threatened with extinction by 2100.)”