Could Batteries Have Helped in Texas’ Electrogeddon?
War planners have long recommended battery backup for solar, wind, and natural gas
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The Arctic blast affecting 150 million Americans across 14 states has revealed that solar and wind, backed up by batteries, aren’t yet a solution for powering our towns and cities, and neither are fossil fuels, which have been immobilized by iced-over rigs, fuel lines, and other equipment.
On the third day of the electrogeddon, some 3.8 million people have been without electricity, and the image suggests an extreme weather-stressed future for which the United States appears likely to require new energy, living, and supply chain systems. In prior years, swaths of the country have been beset by hurricanes, massive fires, and prolonged drought. Now, extraordinary cold is added to the unfolding catalog of alarming weather, which many researchers blame on climate change.
For a decade and longer, entrepreneurs and researchers have spoken of backing up wind and solar with huge collections of lithium-ion batteries that could store and deliver electricity when the wind was not blowing and the sun not shining. Such batteries could also back up natural gas systems, storing and supplying electricity during times of peak demand. But in the case of the current cold snap, if they were not equipped with the right management system, such batteries likely would have failed: Charging below freezing, you can permanently damage the battery unless it is heated up first. More pertinent, the utilities would require next-generation grid batteries capable of long duration, not current systems that typically last just four hours.
The cold toyed with the region’s man-made infrastructure, which was engineered for much warmer weather. It froze half of Texas’ prodigious wind turbine system, the nation’s largest, alone amounting to about an eighth of that state’s total power supply. It also froze oil rigs and lines producing a million barrels of oil a day, along with the associated natural gas.
In Texas, California, Florida, Louisiana, and elsewhere, the question is how far to go to adapt to such weather events. A large number of local residents and governments will be tempted to chalk off the freeze, for instance, to a freak and…
