Last week’s rolling blackouts have left a lot of people wondering what (or who) exactly is to blame. While it’s clear that incredibly cold weather played a significant role, details have only now begun to trickle out about the root causes of the rolling blackouts – and what helped save Texas from a system wide blackout that would have taken hours, if not days, from which to recover. That didn’t stop a lot of people from throwing out bizarre conspiracy theories, unfounded assertions, or claims about the need to build more fossil fuel plants in Texas, all before the facts were even known.
Just the Facts, Please
We’ll get to that soon enough, but first let’s hear from someone who really knows what happened – Trip Doggett, head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s electric grid and ordered utilities to begin rolling blackouts to avert a more serious crisis. In a Texas Tribune interview last week Doggett said: “Our problem was more around the 50 generating units who had issues with their lack of winterization or insufficient winterization efforts that caused the major problem.” 50 generating units. About 7,000 MW of fossil fuel plants, or more than 10% of the supply on the grid, went down last week because of ‘insufficient weatherization.’ Read More
Now we’re talkin’. Austin is already known as one of the “greenest” cities in the nation, and it looks like we’ll soon be even greener – and smarter, too.