"Everything is bigger in Texas!" I learned that five years ago, when we started to spend part of the winter in Corpus Christi. But who would have thunk that applies to winter thingies, like power outages? Not me!
It started harmless enough. The forecast predicted a couple of days with temperatures below freezing, and down into the 20s at night (that's -6 C, for my friends used to metric numbers). No big deal, we thought - we've seen freezing or near-freezing temperatures almost every year we were down here. Usually, temperatures would get back up into the 60s a couple of days later.
So when our power went out on Sunday evening, we did not worry. So what if we never experienced power outages while living in Germany? We've been in the US long enough to get used to them. Usually, they just last a few minutes, or at most a few hours, even if a snow and ice storm with near-hurricane force winds hits Cape Cod.
We were in for a lesson about what "small government" means. "Small government" is considered a great thing in Texas; even the legislature meets only every other year. For electricity, this means that Texas never entered any agreements to share electricity with neighboring states, since doing so would have put its power grid under Federal jurisdiction.
Together with millions of Texans, we learned the consequences of this decision, and the "In business we trust! Regulation is bad!" philosophy, over the next few days. We called out landlord about the outage after half an hour, and heard back from them that the utility company thought that fixing it might take until midnight. So we went to bed early, hoping to have power again when we woke up. Hah!
We woke up to near-freezing temperatures in the apartment. This time, it took the landlord more than an hour to get a hold of anyone at the electricity company, and the news were not good. During the night, power companies all over Texas had started "rotating outages". Supposedly, they cut power to some customers for 15-60 minutes at a time. The reality, however, was very different. Some customers had power the entire time - we could see the outside lights burning all the time at the buildings across from ours. Others had "planned" outages that lasted many hours. But for many, the power did not come back on for days.
After the first night, our landlords tried to help by allowing us to use the fireplace, which had been off limits until then as a "fire hazard". Being good Germans, we of course had followed that rule, and thus not bothered to get any firewood. When we tried to drive to a grocery store to get some, we were in for another surprise. Not that the little stores on North Padre Island were closed - that was to be expected, with power outages now common. The surprise was that the police had closed the JFK Causeway - the only connection to the main land (and open grocery stores). Apparently, there was some ice on the bridge, which made driving way too dangerous. This made me realize how wicked spoiled we are in New England, where somehow the streets remain useable even in snow and ice.
Fortunately, the landlord had allowed me to use some wood he had lying around in the garage - 2x4s under the work bench (but not the wood next to it that was cut to size for sealing up the place during hurricane warnings!). He even had a manual saw hanging on the wall, which gave me an excellent warmup and workout - let's just say its best years were long behind it.
The fireplace was in the back corner of the apartment. Using it helped me understand the difference in heating capacity between a wood burning stove, like we have at home, and a fireplace installed in a climate where typical winter temperatures are in the high 60s. The wood stove in our Cape Cod home can actually heat up the entire place; the little corner fire place looks very nice. But if you sit just a foot or two away from it, just out of range of the sparks that the construction wood will generate, you can stay warm. Yes, we definitely were lucky.
At some time, our neighbor managed to organize an emergency generator that he ran near-constantly from then on. Since houses are about 6 feet apart here, and the generator was on his back patio and did not have any noise suppression, we absolutely knew when his generator was running. It did not quite sound like a plane trying to take off, but it clearly seemed to be aiming in this direction. My admiration for my lovely wife grew a bit when I saw she could sleep through that noise. I got some sleep, too, at least until my ears hurt so bad from the ear plugs that I had to take them out.
On day 2 of the Big Freeze, temperatures during the day rose above freezing, and the police opened the bridge to the mainland again. Afraid that they might spoil the islanders too much, and that there might be some ice hiding on the road at other places, they decided to keep the main highway into Corpus Christi closed, though. We needed to get to the hardware store which was on the other side of Flour Bluff - usually a 10 minute trip on the highway. But with the 6-lane highway closed, the only other option to get there was to use a little 2-lane bridge a few miles further south. No problem - that was the way we often took after windsurfing to go to Lazy Beach Brewing! So what if we had to share the small roads with thousands of other cars, which extended to 10-minute trip to more than an hour - at least we go there! And we were able to score some burnable construction wood, at prices that were only twice as high as on Cape Cod. And sawing that wood into small pieces was a lot easier than before thanks to a brand new saw.
We had big hopes to get power again on day 3, because the forecast had predicted 50 degrees (10 C) and sunshine. But once again, the weather remained much colder than predicted, and the sun never made it through the clouds. We saw a few work trucks at the local power substation, and some business and intersections on North Padre Island got their power back, but our house never did.
At this point, we were getting a bit tired of the cold, and the idea of a warm shower seemed like something heavenly. So we looked at hotels in the area. We had done so haphazardly before, but this time, we were serious! But every hotel that we called to verify that the rooms shown on the internet were still available either had no power, or no water. The water was a new thing: in many areas in Texas, the water supply suffered within a couple of days of the power going down. Sometimes, the water plants had power outages, and no backup generators. At other places, many people without power opened the faucets to prevent pipes from freezing and bursting; and often, pipes did burst, but the water was not cut off for various reasons. All that reduced water levels to dangerously low levels, and reduced the water pressure to a slow trickle - if the water was not shut off completely.
On North Padre Island, we were lucky, because the water was never shut off all the way. For a day or so, the pressure dropped so low that toilet tanks had to be refilled by hand, and filling a gallon mug with water took a few minutes - but we still had water. Around that time, I also realized how lucky I was that my Raynaud's disease is just a very mild form, so that my fingers only hurt briefly after washing my hands, until they were warmed up again at the fireplace.
But today, on the fourth day without power or hot water, we had reached the point were a 3-hour drive to South Padre Island seemed too tempting. Temperatures were a bit warmer down here, and hotels still had power, running water, and free rooms. On the drive from North to South Padre Island, we saw hundreds of wind turbines working just fine in the strong wind; interestingly, we also saw at least 50 wind turbines that were not running, right next to others that ran. That's at least 100 MW of unused capacity - for no apparent reason, since temperatures were in the mid-40s, and wind speeds were just about ideal.
Some Republican politicians, including the governor, have jumped on the opportunity to blame renewable energy sources for the power problems. That strategy will probably work well with their voters: deflect the blame to something they had. However, their statements have been proven to largely be a lie (check this article in Newsweek, or this article from NPR). If you dig just a bit deeper, you can see that the problems arise directly from the free, largely unregulated energy market in Texas. Less than 20% of the electricity in Texas is generated by electric utilities; about 80% is produced by "independent power producers" and similar commercial sources. Those independent providers have no responsibility to the consumer at all - instead, their only objective is maximizing profits. They have increasingly chosen wind turbines simple because this is the most profitable energy source in Texas, where wind and space are plenty. This happened even though Texas does not provide any state subsidies for renewable energy - the state only subsidizes fossil energy sources (oil and gas). But in the quest to maximize profits without responsibility to customers, the energy providers run an extremely lean ship, with a "grid reserve margin" of only 7.4%. When they installed wind turbines, they chose not to install cold weather packages, which would increase costs, but allow wind turbines to work perfectly fine in temperatures down to at least -4 F.
The current power crisis in Texas (which was preceded by power outages last September) is a logical consequence of all this - profit maximization with minimal regulation. At least one Texas gas company has been very happy with the recent problems, saying that it has "hit the jackpot" since it was able to sell gas at highly inflated prices during the crisis.
Well, enough of that. We are now in South Padre Island. It's very windy, but we did not even bring our wetsuits - air temperatures in the 40s and water temps that are probably in the 30s just did not seem attractive after 4 days of freezing. At least we are warm now!
