OPINION: Unpacking Houston's electricity outages - Part I

The Houston area has been subjected to two widespread power outages this year. Many in our region went two weeks or longer before power was restored. The outages have sparked widespread public outrage and castigation of the power companies, primarily CenterPoint, by the media and politicians.

However, there has been generally more heat than light as far as understanding Houston’s vulnerable grid and how to improve it. We are faced with a multi-faceted, complex problem. There are no easy answers, no silver bullets. But that does not mean that we cannot improve the situation or that we should settle for the current dysfunction. To do so is costly, risks the health of some of our fellow Houstonians and is causing serious brand damage to Houston.

Deconflating Generation and Distribution Issues

There are two distinct problems that cause the loss of power in our region. The most common is damage to the distribution system, generally caused by some kind of weather event. Occasionally, part of the electric distribution is taken down by flood waters but much more frequently the outages are caused by wind damage to overhead power lines.

Less common are events when the Texas grid (ERCOT) does not have enough power to meet the demand of all its users. Generally, the failure of the system to generate enough power are fairly short-term events and have historically been more common in the summer, especially later in the day. 

More serious shortages in the winter occur less frequently. The near total collapse of the grid during the Uri winter storm in February 2021 was an extreme example of this kind of event.

It is possible that an event can cause both generation and distribution disruptions. Also, flaws in the distribution system can exacerbate a generation failure. Uri was an example of both.

I am increasingly convinced that it is unlikely that we are going to have another near collapse of generation like we saw in Uri. There have been a number of reforms to how the grid operates that make a potential collapse much less likely.  Also, new generation, especially solar and battery back-up, is being rapidly added to the grid and the State seems to be determined to add more natural gas back-up power.

However, relatively little has been done to improve the problems with our regional distribution system. That is likely because it is a much more difficult problem. Adding additional generation is mostly a money problem. Federal subsidies are incentivizing solar power to quickly be added to the grid and the State can throw enough money at the problem, especially over a few years, to make sure there is sufficient electricity on the grid. But the issues in attempting to make the distribution system more reliable are much more complex and involve the resolution of numerous conflicting interests.

The Hurricane Ike Study

Immediately after Hurricane Ike in 2008, the mayor, Bill White, appointed a task force to study the impact of that storm of Houston’s grid and to make recommendations on making it more resilient in future storms. The task force was chaired by Paul Hobby and produced a comprehensive and well-researched report. There is a link to that report. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is seriously interested in this topic. Here are the key takeaways:

The vast majority of the damage in Ike was done by trees falling into power lines or branches of the trees breaking off and falling onto power lines. The failure of grid elements, such as towers collapsing or poles breaking, was less than 1%.

The report encourages the prioritization of vegetation control as the most immediate and cost-effective way to minimize future failures. However, its recommendations are more far-reaching than just that CenterPoint needs to do a better job of cutting back trees. As it points out, many of the trees that fall into lines are outside of CenterPoint’s right-of-way and therefore, the company has no right to clear them. It describes a more comprehensive approach that includes where and what type of trees should be planted near power lines.

The report discusses the importance of improving the grid’s “intelligence” to allow CenterPoint to more quickly identify where faults have occurred and allow it to re-route power temporarily until they can be cleared.

The report mostly throws cold water on the possibility of burying existing utility lines. The task force estimated the cost of burying all of CenterPoint’s lines at $35 billion, and that is in 2009 dollars. That would be at least $50 billion in today’s dollars. To put that in some perspective, that is over five times CenterPoint’s annual revenue. It also points out that Houston’s frequent flooding events complicate burying electric lines.

The report encourages various forms of distributed generation to make end users less reliant on power from the grid. 

The Hobby report is a great blueprint for improving the reliability of our region’s electrical grid. I have come to some slightly different conclusions than the report did, and some things have changed since 2009. 

More on that soon.