The website Investopedia, which focuses on investing and finance education, defines a black swan event as follows: “A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.”
The great Polar Vortex of 2021 that has been so devastating to at least 14 states and most severely Texas certainly qualifies as ‘a black swan event’ as defined in the first sentence of Investopedia’s explanation. It was beyond what is normally expected in that part of the country and it indeed had severe consequences. It will go down as one of the worst natural disasters in American history and winter still has a few weeks to go.
But it will also be recorded as one of the worst man-made disasters in history as massive blackouts caused by woefully inadequate contingency planning, a lack of foresight in winterizing the grid, power plants and natural gas infrastructure, and decades of poor public policy decisions put lives and livelihoods at risk. Those charged with the responsibility for preventing or at least mitigating its dangers failed and failed miserably.
As America has moved aggressively toward a future more dependent on electricity powered by renewable energy like wind and solar and away from fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and oil, this disaster was predictable. It was as if the politicians and policy planners decided that we could go cold turkey and simply replace one form of energy generation with another in a seamless transition.
But wind and solar require the wind to be blowing and the sun to be shining to turn the turbines or heat the panels and therefore produce electricity. It makes energy production subject to the vagaries of the weather and unlike a fossil fuel power plant it can’t be told to ramp up by the grid operator when the power is needed.
To be sure, the recent travails of the grid operators at ERCOT in Texas and the Southwest Power pool that affects 14 other states cannot be completely blamed on the poor performance of the frozen blades of wind turbines or snow-covered and iced-over solar panels.
Coal and natural gas plants went offline as well as the demand for natural gas for heating surged as temperatures plummeted. There simply was not enough pipeline capacity to supply both homes and power plants.
But what electricity did flow was from natural gas, coal and nuclear plants. Imagine if in recent years Texas had shuttered all of its fossil fuel plants as demanded by environmentalists and was 100% dependent on wind and solar?
At the opposite end of the weather spectrum, last summer on August 14-15, California experienced its first major blackouts since its infamous energy crisis of 2000-01, when a major heat wave in the West and Desert Southwest caused demand to outstrip supply.
California’s wind turbines didn’t spin in the sweltering heat and when the sun went down its solar farms couldn’t produce the required crop of megawatts to meet the increased air conditioning load.
To compound the problem, California, which on any given day depends on 20 to 30 percent of its electricity in the form of imports from neighboring states, found that the imports were “staying home” as those states faced the same heat wave and needed the power for their own needs.
Two very different states in so many ways yet joined together in their pursuit of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels despite one, namely Texas, being America’s energy giant with vast reserves of natural gas and the Permian basin filled with black gold.
The second sentence in the Investopedia definition of a black swan event is that they are “…characterized by their extreme rarity, severe impact and the widespread insistence that were obvious in hindsight.”
It’s that last part about being “obvious in hindsight” that is instructive here.
In both the Texas and California blackouts what happened had been predicted as wind and solar increased as a share of generation capacity. This only increased the likelihood that under extreme weather conditions outages would occur. Already with the benefit of hindsight we are seeing the “widespread insistence” of the obvious facts that policy makers often ignore.
The one obvious fact that can’t be ignored is that before we embark on the electrification of America to power not only homes and businesses, but very soon all our vehicles and the increasing number of computers and devices to operate them, we will need to go back to the future.
We must be realistic and admit to ourselves that we will depend on fossil fuels to run the power plants providing that reliable baseload, and there when you flip the switch, electricity. As the transition to renewable energy accelerates, integrating and balancing the traditional baseload fossil fuel generation with the intermittent renewable generation will be one of the biggest challenges.
One final thought.
During the pandemic policy makers and health experts have said that we must follow the science when it comes to dealing with COVID-19 and how we can conquer it. No one has set a date certain as to when we will conquer it and return to normal life.
It is the same when it comes to the transition from reliable fossil fuels to produce electricity to the intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar.
When it comes to electricity, the policy makers should refrain from setting arbitrary dates in the future by which we will have replaced the internal combustion engine with electric motors that will power our cars, trucks, and airplanes. Likewise, with replacing fossil fueled power plants with renewable energy.
The science should inform us. As with the pandemic, they should follow the science.
Fossil fuels have been powering America and the world since the late 19th Century and they will continue to power it until that time when new forms of energy, some not yet discovered, power it into the latter half of the 21st Century and beyond.
