The Texas power grid failure: fragility and attitudes

The grid is responsible for modern civilization, yet its failure can imperil life itself. It’s a 20th-century antique that, when foiled by 21st-century factors, can send us back to the 19th century, when Thomas Edison’s company built coal-fired dynamos on Pearl Street to illuminate Lower Manhattan.

“The grid is not just something we built, but something that grew with America, changed as our values changed, and gained its form as we developed as a nation,” writes anthropologist Gretchen Bakke in “The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future.” The grid is “a peculiarly invasive infrastructure that touches every life, pierces every wall, bifurcates every landscape, and runs every battery.”

Grid glitches are part of modern life in the United States, but they are typically brief; every day about half a million Americans lose power for an hour or two. Sometimes the grid can’t handle demand. Sometimes it can’t handle foliage or squirrels. The grid is “highly inventive in places, totally stodgy in some, fantastically Rube Goldberg in yet others,” writes Bakke. “As implausible as it must sound, the machine that holds the whole of our modern life in place ‘works in practice, but not in theory.’ No one can see, grasp or plan for the whole of it.” ...

This week the Arctic came to Texas. It was a climatic surge that short-circuited a man-made system. Nearly 4 million Texans were powerless Tuesday (as were over 150,000 Oregonians, and over 50,000 West Virginians).'

Pipes burst. People froze. As the Texas power grid labored, its human power structure flickered.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) had time to go on Sean Hannity’s show Tuesday night to blame renewable resources like wind and solar, even though the bulk of Texas power — and current power outages — comes from natural gas. ...

Would this be happening if Texas, a secessionist state craving freedom from federal oversight, had not insisted on its own grid? When the government began regulating interstate utilities in 1935, Texas kept its power to itself. Now most of the United States is powered by two mega-grids, the Eastern and Western interconnections, while Texas cultivates its own island of electricity. ...