Six of the state’s power plants went offline last week due to maintenance problems. This is just the beginning. ClimateEmergency ClimateChange From _e_delger
And of course, extreme weather of all kinds endangers the state’s electric grid, which is already stretched to its breaking point. At least one of the six power plants that shut down on Friday hadafter ERCOT asked facilities to stay online to deal with the heat wave. Disastrous power outages during Winter Storm Uri last year turned a spotlight on the grid’s flagging capacity. While ERCOT claims to have added more generating power since last year, experts say that’s still not enough.
The state’s growing wind and solar industries are helping, both with electricity-generating capacity and with the price of electricity. But ultimately, the grid needs to be redesigned to more seamlessly integrate these renewable but intermittent sources of energy, according to Dessler. In addition, he said, the state desperately needs more power lines to transport electricity from West Texas, where sun and wind are abundant, to population centers in East Texas.
While the climate and the power grid are both at perilous points right now, experts and activists alike emphasize that there’s still time—albeit a shrinking window of time—to fix the situation. “We’re shown a lot of these apocalyptic movies and shows of the singular event that happens that wipes everything out,” said Gomez from the Sunrise Movement. In reality, he pointed out, climate change is a steadily growing march of earlier and longer heat waves, higher category hurricanes, more flooding in coastal areas, longer droughts, and more dangerous wildfires.
“I think once people start to realize that that is what we’re talking about, then it’ll be much clearer, much more apparent [that] it is now, it’s happening, we need to do more now,” he said. In the meantime, temperatures are still unseasonably hot, and according to long-range weather forecasts, Texas has an
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