Why Texas’ mass power outages continue to happen

“Why Texas’ mass power outages continue to happen” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

It’s become a familiar cycle: A powerful storm sweeps through a swath of Texas and takes the electric system down in its grip. Trees might bend and topple, crashing down onto a power pole. Sometimes the weight of ice pulls branches onto electric lines. Other times wind makes a wire spark, and that ember ignites a destructive blaze.

Thousands of Texans then sit in the dark for days — in either the blistering heat or frigid cold — waiting for utility crews to survey and fix the damage so electricity can start flowing again.

Such power outages are likely to continue.

That’s because the massive network of equipment that moves electricity across the state and then to individual Texas homes and businesses is unprepared for the severe weather expected in years ahead, experts say. Making it more resilient will require utilities to invest money to strengthen the system over time.

Texas had 210 weather-related power outages — more than any other state — from 2000 to 2023, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central that used power outage data from the U.S. Department of Energy.

As emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gasses continue to increase temperatures, severe weather disasters will worsen. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense, according to Climate Central. Warmer oceans fuel storms, causing hurricanes to likely be stronger. Days before Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the Texas coast July 8, it set records for its strength so early in the hurricane season.

Beryl made its way inland toward Houston as a Category 1 hurricane and knocked out power to more than 2.6 million customers — showing how vulnerable the grid’s infrastructure in Southeast Texas was to high winds. Hundreds of thousands of power customers still didn’t have the lights on more than a week after the storm as linemen worked to replace poles and broken equipment.

It was yet another period in recent years where massive outages left Texans without electricity.

A powerful windstorm in mid-May known as a derecho slammed the Houston region with 100-mile-per-hour winds, knocking out power for nearly 1 million customers in the so-called energy capital of the world. City officials, residents and utility companies were still trying to recover from the damage from that storm when Hurricane Beryl hit in July.

“It’s like the big, bad wolf: Huff and puff and blow the house down,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “And I don’t think any utility or city designs for weather like that, at least not weather that frequent.”

Icicles hang from telephone poles and power lines after an ice storm in north Austin on Feb. 1, 2023. Credit: Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune

More than 500,000 customers had their electricity knocked out in the Dallas-Fort Worth area after severe storms in May. And in Austin, more than 170,000 lost power after a damaging ice storm swept across Central Texas in 2023.

These all came on the heels of a different, deadly grid problem. A winter storm in 2021 infamously plunged millions across the state into cold darkness because there wasn’t enough power generation to meet demand. People lost trust in the system as state officials — many of whom rarely acknowledge climate change — hurried to fix it.

With Beryl, Gov. Greg Abbott pinned the blame squarely on CenterPoint Energy, which is responsible for maintaining the electric poles and wires in the Houston area.

At a news conference one week after the hurricane, Abbott said, “This isn’t a failure of the entire system.”

But in some ways it was.

Legislators have focused on power generation — not power lines and poles.

Texas is the only state to have its own power grid. It doesn’t have significant connections to the grids that serve the eastern and western halves of the United States. And it’s been the focus of Abbott and the Legislature since the 2021 winter storm pushed it to the brink of total failure.

Freezing weather during that storm knocked power producers offline, and the plants that remained operating couldn’t generate the amount of electricity needed to flow through transmission and distribution lines to keep Texans’ heat on. That shortage forced grid operators to call for abrupt, dayslong blackouts to prevent the system’s complete collapse. More than 200 people died.

After the disaster, legislators decided Texas needed more power sources that could come on as needed. They required power generation facilities to make their equipment more resilient in winter weather. And they introduced financial mechanisms to try to get more on-demand power facilities built. Notably, state politicians allocated $5 billion to incentivize companies to build more gas-fueled power generators in the state.

A car moves through the dark in a West Austin neighborhood without power on Feb 18, 2021. Credit: Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune

But building power plants and changing the electricity market takes time, and the grid’s fragility remained clear as grid operators last summer repeatedly asked people to use less power. On those days, it looked like power generators might not be able to keep up with surging demand for electricity that comes when people turn down their thermostats to fight sizzling outdoor temperatures.

Then came a bombshell this year when grid operators said power demand could nearly double in six years. After that, Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said they wanted to add $5 billion more to that pot of money to get more gas-fueled plants built.

But those big efforts don’t help with how vulnerable the power poles and lines are — as continuous storms like Beryl make clear.

“The hurricane is throwing trees around, taking out wires,” said Michael Jewell, a longtime regulatory attorney. “It’s not that there wasn’t enough power. It was a fundamental problem with regard to, if you’ve got trees flying all over the place, they’re going to take down wires.”

The grid will need decades of public investment to strengthen it, said Michael Skelly, co-founder and CEO of Grid United, an independent high voltage transmission project developer based in Houston. Local and state leaders need to decide how reliable they want the grid to be and how much they are willing to pay for it. What number of outages would be acceptable in what kinds of storms?

“We know we live in an area subject to extreme weather,” Skelly said. “We believe the extreme weather is actually getting worse. The current distribution infrastructure isn’t adequate apparently for the job at hand. What level of reliability do we want to try to get to and what are we prepared to invest?”

Strengthening comes at a cost

Utilities and state leaders have clear options for strengthening utility infrastructure if they or customers are willing to pay for it.

Earlier this year, power lines caused the largest wildfire in the state’s history. It begged the question of whether utilities in the Panhandle should spend more to wrap as many poles as possible with fire retardant material or cover wires so they are less likely to spark.

Now utilities in Southeast Texas are under pressure to protect power infrastructure better against lightning and high winds. To do that, utilities could use poles made out of materials that are stronger than wood or place poles closer together; more aggressively trim or remove trees around power lines; or in some cases bury lines underground, experts said.

Strategies will vary by region and by the different hazards that impact that region, said Scott Aaronson, senior vice president of security and preparedness at Edison Electric Institute, a trade association.

But electric grid improvements can have limitations. Burying power lines is especially costly and might not be appropriate for flood-prone places like Houston, Aaronson said. He argued that above-ground power lines are also more cost-effective for workers to rebuild.

Utilities might also need more leeway for tree-trimming beyond the current right-of-way. Thomas Gleeson, chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas that regulates electricity, offered that potential solution at a news conference after Beryl, but said the Legislature would have to give utilities such permission.

Public Utility Commissioner Jimmy Glotfelty questioned at a meeting after Beryl how much of the tree damage was caused by limbs that were in the right-of-way that a utility could have accessed to cut back. He said he was astonished by how many trees in Houston toppled over from their roots, requiring crane operators to remove them from the road.

Trees in Houston faced significant stress due to a series of severe weather events over the past 15 years, including extreme drought in 2011, flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the winter freeze in 2021 and intense heat in 2022 and 2023, said Gretchen Riley, a forest systems department head at Texas A&M; Forest Service. Riley said these events have weakened many trees, making them more vulnerable to damage from storms and high winds.

Houston has approximately 36 million trees in the city, according to an online tree census maintained by Texas A&M; Forest Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Riley described Beryl as potentially being “the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back” for many of them. CenterPoint reported on Sunday that its workers had removed more than 18,600 trees impacting lines so far.

Beryl mainly damaged CenterPoint’s distribution infrastructure — which includes the poles and wires that bring power to homes, according to the company. The bigger transmission wires and towers more or less survived. The story was not the same everywhere. Entergy Texas, which serves areas around College Station and Beaumont, reported damage to its substations and transmission lines.

Mikhail Kochukov surveys a tree toppled by Hurricane Beryl on Monday, July 8, 2024, in Houston. Credit: Annie Mulligan for The Texas Tribune

“This storm is further evidence of why hardening the grid is so important, because that investment serves to reduce the extent and duration of outages and reduces overall storm costs,” Entergy Texas president and CEO Eliecer Viamontes told state regulators at the Public Utility Commission of Texas meeting after the storm.

A path forward

Last year, the Legislature made it possible for utility companies to create plans to strengthen their systems. This is one potential way that — if state regulators approve it — utilities could start charging more to replace poles or trim more trees, for example. In many cases, those costs would be charged to power providers that sell power, which would then likely pass the costs to customers.

“To some extent we are paying for global warming and we’re having to make investments today that would have been prudent to make in the past — prudent and probably less expensive,” said Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas. “And we might also have avoided a lot of misery.”

Webber, the energy resources professor, said spending more up front for a stronger electric system would save money and even protect peoples’ lives and health better over the long term.

In its proposed resiliency plan submitted to regulators in April, Centerpoint suggested investing more than $2 billion to strengthen its poles and wires, using federal and state funding to cover some of the costs. The proposal included spending $376 million to replace wooden transmission structures with steel or concrete, and $99 million to replace or brace some 5,000 wooden distribution poles per year from 2025 to 2027.

By comparison, Oncor proposed investing nearly $3 billion to harden poles, replace old cables and install underground wires. This includes $285 million to expand the company’s vegetation management program which includes tree trimming and satellite and laser imaging to detect which tree limbs need to be cleared, and $900 million for wildfire protections including monitoring and detection systems. Oncor’s territories include Dallas-Fort Worth and Midland-Odessa.

Utilities also need to consider how they can help provide power generation to critical facilities such as hospitals and fire stations during regional outages, said Jewell, the regulatory attorney. This could mean helping install small batteries and rooftop solar panels or having small generators ready to deploy.

It won’t be possible to protect against every possible scenario at an affordable cost, Jewell said. But he argues taking a varied approach to resiliency will help. That could entail improving buildings’ energy efficiency by adding insulation or sealing windows to help maintain temperatures during short outages.

“Part of the reason that we have these outages is the storms are getting worse,” Jewell said. “In one sense, there’s a realistic problem that we can try to protect the grid against any foreseeable storm and people will not be able to afford electricity. As frustrating as it is, there is a balancing that needs to take place in all of this.”

Either way, customers should expect higher bills. The costs to make the system more resilient will likely be passed on to Texans. But, so, too might the costs to repair damage to utility companies’ infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of an extreme weather event.

“Ultimately, the bill is going to get loaded onto the backs of the customers, whether or not they were pleased with how [the power outage] was handled,” Sandra Haverlah, president of the Texas Consumer Association.

Disclosure: CenterPoint Energy, Entergy, Oncor and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/18/texas-energy-grid-power-outages-climate-change-infrastructure/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.