Texas blackouts prevented with renewable energy

Twelve months later, the state’s electrical grid, while improved, is still vulnerable to weather-induced power outages.

“If we got another storm this year, like Uri in 2021, the grid would go down again,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “This is still a huge risk for us.”

Now, a recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy.

“Technically and economically, we have 95 percent of the technologies we need to transition everything today,” said Mark Jacobson, lead author of the paper and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Wind, water and solar already account for about one fifth of the nation’s electricity, although a full transition in many areas is slow.

The study showed a switch to renewables would also lower energy requirements, reduce consumer costs, create millions of new jobs and improve people’s health.

For years, some have expressed skepticism about the viability of large-scale adoption of renewables, owing it to their costs. But Dessler said that while solar was an expensive energy source 10 years ago, it is one of the cheapest today.

“A lot of people’s understanding of renewable energy is extremely out of date,” said Dessler, who was not involved in the research.

Wind energy can also be very effective and provides half of Texas’s energy some days — a fact he surprised podcaster Joe Rogan with when he appeared as a guest on Thursday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

“Solar and wind are the cheapest energy sources available,” Dessler said. “People don’t seem to understand that, and they also don’t understand that we know how to make a reliable grid that’s mainly renewables.”

In the recent study, Jacobson and colleagues showed how to meet energy demands every 30 seconds across the United States with no blackouts in a greener, more populated nation in 2050 and 2051.

In the simulations, they imagined all vehicles were electric or powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Electric heat pumps, water heaters, wind turbines and solar panels replaced their fossil fuel alternatives. The team also included new geothermal sources but no new hydroelectric plants.

They modeled grid stability throughout the contiguous United States, including data from a weather-climate-air pollution model, which includes climate factors and statistically typical weather patterns that occur in a given region. Using energy consumption data from the Energy Information Administration, the team simulated energy demands for 2050-2051. Energy supply had to equal energy demand every 30 seconds, otherwise the model shut down.

The team found the actual energy demand decreased significantly by simply shifting to renewable resources, which are more efficient. For the entire United States, total end-use energy demand decreased by around 57 percent. Per capita household annual energy costs were around 63 percent less than a “business as usual” scenario.

“Everything that we currently do using fossil fuels would be done using technology that is run through electricity,” said Anna-Katharina von Krauland, a co-author and doctoral candidate in Jacobson’s lab. “The amount of energy that’s needed to perform activities, basically to turn on the light or to fuel industrial processes, that would actually be decreased if you use more efficient energy supply.”

During an extreme weather event, the lower energy demand is important to help keep the grid online. In Texas, a complete green transition would reduce the annual average end-use power demand by 56 percent. It also reduces peak loads, or the highest amount of energy one draws from the grid at a time. Jacobson said many homes would also have their own storage and wouldn’t need to rely on the grid as much.

The team also found interconnecting electrical grids from different geographic regions can make the power system more reliable and reduce costs. Larger regions are more likely to have the wind blowing, the sun shining or hydroelectric power running somewhere else, which may be able to help fill any supply gaps.

“The intermittency of renewable energy declines as you look at larger and larger areas,” said Dessler. “If it’s not windy in Texas, it could be windy in Iowa. In that case, they could be overproducing power and they could be shipping some of their extra power to us.”

The study stated costs per unit energy in Texas are 27 percent lower when interconnected with the Midwest grid than when isolated, as it currently is.

“In pretty much across the board, we find that it would be less expensive, more reliable, make better use of the energy if we were to expand on interconnection,” von Krauland said. She adds though that “even if every state were islanded by itself that it would still be feasible to implement 100 percent wind water and solar energy in every individual state.”

During winter in Texas, Jacobson said more properly maintained wind turbines would also help maintain energy supply. During the February 2021 cold spell, some frozen wind turbines were shut down because of a lack of de-icing equipment. (Coal, gas and nuclear sources also shut down from direct freezing of the equipment and contributed to a much larger dip in energy.)

“On those days that it’s cold, you have a lot of wind, which is really good news because when it’s cold, you have the heating demand,” Jacobson said. “You actually get more power output on cold days.”

During the winter, low sunlight may also render solar panels not as useful. In this case, the wind turbines and solar panels are complementary energy sources. If both were to fail at a point, then another energy source, such as geothermal or hydroelectric, could kick in.

Batteries are also used to supply energy when solar or wind power is low, but the team showed long-duration batteries are not necessary or helpful for grid stability. Many 4-hour batteries currently on the market can be connected to provide long-term storage, such as during blackouts. This finding is particularly useful as ultralong duration battery technology may still be relatively far away from hitting the market.

“It’s wrong to think of renewables as unreliable because you don’t think about renewables by themselves,” Dessler said. “You think of them as part of a system. A stable grid that features a lot of renewables will also feature a firm dispatchable power that will pick up when the renewables go down.”

The team’s simulations also suggested blackouts in California, like those in August 2020, could also be avoided at a low cost. Installing more offshore wind turbines during the summer could provide energy to help cool buildings. Transitioning to all clean, renewable energy could also decrease energy demand in California by 60 percent.

In addition to improving grid stability, the study found operating a clean, renewable grid could create almost 5 million long-term, full-time jobs, from construction to manufacturing to indirect employment at businesses. The systems would also produce cleaner air, which could reduce pollution-related deaths by 53,000 people per year and reduce pollution-related illnesses for millions of people in 2050.

“This is an incredibly important study,” said Robert Howarth, a professor at Cornell University and who is not involved in the research. “The fossil fuel industries continue to argue that renewables are a dangerous experiment, and that grid stability and reliability will continue to depend at least in part on fossil fuels. Here, Jacobson and his colleagues clearly show this is not the case at all.”

Dessler agrees that he does not think the findings of this study are “controversial at all.”

“Obviously, it will work just because there’s so much renewable energy available on the planet. Just from a physics standpoint, there’s no fundamental constraint here,” he said. “The constraint is political. You’ve got to get people to get together and decide to do this, and that’s really what’s difficult.”

During the February 2021 cold spell, former Texas governor Rick Perry said Texans would spend even longer in the cold and without electricity “to keep the federal government out of their business” and thwart Democrats who want to propose new regulations.

Around 15 states and territories and more than 180 cities have created policies increasing the amount of renewable electricity, but Jacobson hopes findings like this will give confidence to policymakers to pass laws and policies for a more rapid transition. Jacobson’s previous studies and work through his nonprofit The Solutions Project have helped informed plans such as the Green New Deal and state legislature.

“We do need a really rapid transition by 80 percent [of clean energy] by 2030 and 100 percent as soon as possible after that,” Jacobson said. “It really requires a large scale effort among lots of people to solve this problem. It’s not one scientific study that is going to solve the problem.”