We have been writing this column now for almost a year, but recently realized we’ve neglected to explain why.

First of all, the title:  Energy Matters.  You can read this as a short sentence, with “Energy” as the subject and “Matters” as the verb.  Or you can just see it as a noun phrase, a label: “matters having to do with energy.”  In brief, we write about the latter because we believe the former.

To a physicist, pretty much everything boils down to energy. Energy is essential to our daily lives in every way, and more so all the time. Cumulatively, this results in the fact that human society’s energy demands are so immense now that they are substantially altering the energy dynamics of the planet itself.

We make domestic energy-related decisions all the time, but how often are they well thought out? How often do we just follow assumptions or our “instincts” about what makes sense? Says the physicist, not often enough and altogether too often, respectively.

And what happens when these widely made assumptions are applied to the policy decisions by governments? Here’s what: you get a lot of physicists yelling at the radio and the TV, “What are the numbers?” “What are the percentages?” “What’s ‘a lot?’?” Why don’t they ask ‘How Much?’!”

Because it turns out that there are actually answers to questions having to do with energy.  They aren’t always perfectly clear-cut, but you can usually come up with a rational answer.  The problem is, people and the modern media are very often NOT rational, and those “instincts” of ours – well, turns out they just aren’t very reliable!

With this column we hope to give people some practice at analyzing the numbers when it comes to energy-related decisions, be they in your own home, in proposed state legislation or in national policy decisions.  What “seems” to make sense might make very little sense if you actually do the numbers!  We hope, by exploring various aspects and issues in our modern relationship with energy, to empower readers to make well-founded energy decisions.

In our past few columns we had been wandering the wonderful world of our friend the “Grid,” hoping to bridge a serious lack of acquaintance with it that may afflict some of us non-physics majors. We were going to move on to Part IV of that series, but a few things came up in the meantime, and one of them was the freaky winter event in the central U.S.  It rang so many alarm bells about unspecified degrees of responsibility for the problems, we’re just going to defer the Grid discussion for a bit longer and ask readers to indulge a little “aside” about the Texas grid failure.

Texas made big news around Valentine’s day when the jet stream weakened and wobbled and brought the polar vortex all the way down to the Mexican border.  In Texas this resulted in an unprecedented power outage for close to half of its population.  While you may have heard sources that tried to blame wind turbines, they actually had virtually no impact on the disaster. While a few turbines did fail because they were not properly winterized, they only contributed 10% to the under-supply of electricity.

A combination of other factors are actually to blame.  There are two immediate factors: 1. The cold created a high demand for both natural gas and electricity, and 2. Much of the natural gas supply was essentially cut off.

When demand goes up the utility will first try to increase the supply to accommodate the added load. If they are unable to meet that demand they will start “load shedding.” That means they will start rolling blackouts to make up the difference, which they anticipate needing to do on occasion. The problem arose because of the second factor: not only were they unable to increase the supply to meet the demand, but many of their gas generating stations stopped functioning because they were not winterized.  On top of that the gas pipelines were freezing up. The gas itself doesn’t freeze, but many natural gas wells produce water at the same time.  In colder climates this water is removed, but to save costs they were not doing this in Texas and the water froze in the lines.

The larger question of blame is how Texas reached this point.  Briefly, it had mainly to do with deregulation combined with Texas’s choice not to interconnect with other grids.  The deregulation incentivized cost cutting over building robustness and resilience in the system.  That is the reason the plants were not winterized and water not removed from gas lines. The lack of connectivity made it impossible to buy power from neighboring states.  A side effect of the scarcity of power is that residential customers who had chosen a supposedly cheaper wholesale pricing scheme (in a market without consumer protections) ended up paying more than 100 times what they normally pay for a few days of power.

In summary, 90% of the problem was with cost-saving decisions by fossil fuel and utility providers whose assumptions included a low likelihood of climate change-type weather disasters. (What were we saying about assumptions?)

Paul Stancioff, PhD., is a professor of Physics at the University of Maine Farmington who studies energy economics on the side.  He can be reached at pauls@maine.edu.  Cynthia Stancioff, one-time English major, likes to re-word things. Previous columns can be found at https://paulandcynthiaenergymatters.blogspot.com/ 

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