There were plenty of recommendations for Texas to prepare for poor weather after the 2011 winter.
The parts of Texas that aren't on the Texas grid did a lot better. El Paso is on the western power grid, but they also invested in preparing for colder temperatures.
Excellent point. This isn't, pardon the pun, their first rodeo. Texas has had extreme weather events in the not-so-distant past and there is of course the possibility for that in the future, so one would expect that preparedness might get considered. Meredith Angwin wrote a book that touches on this subject called "Shorting the Grid"
Which delves into the issues with deregulated markets like what Texas operates and how the pursuit of profits doesn't reward high CAPEX resiliency upgrades where the lowest possible OPEX allows one to sell the most capacity. This is the main reason for the wind/gas pairing as both are extremely low OPEX (wind has almost zero OPEX) and low CAPEX procurement cost and the fracking revolution has made gas the natural pairing with wind's intermittency at the cheapest possible price.
If these events were frequent enough to make further bolstering of these assets profitable, it would be pursued, but at this juncture, in this type of framework, that's not the case. It will be interesting to see if any policy is enacted after this to attempt to modify that behaviour or not.
Some obvious examples of this are:
- No generator housing buildings at the nuke plants. There is no "turbine hall", the unit sits on a slab out in the open
- No heat systems on the wind turbines (blades, controls, turbine housing)
- No heat tracing on gas pumps
I doubt we'll see any upgrades on any of those things even though things like a turbine hall that could be heated would be a very cheap addition.
Further interconnectivity would have helped but the massive deficit of 10's of thousands of MW would have required absolutely massive links in order to fully mitigate, which is realistically not viable. Recall that the trip at Beck II caused a massive grid collapse in Ontario and the northern US states that was exasperated by the nature of the interconnects and the 2,000MW link to Quebec was not significant.
