How unprecedented was the February 2021 Texas cold snap?

Abstract

Winter storm Uri brought severe cold to the southern United States in February 2021, causing a cascading failure of interdependent systems in Texas where infrastructure was not adequately prepared for such cold. In particular, the failure of interconnected energy systems restricted electricity supply just as demand for heating spiked, leaving millions of Texans without heat or electricity, many for several days. This motivates the question: did historical storms suggest that such temperatures were known to occur, and if so with what frequency? We compute a temperature-based proxy for heating demand and use this metric to answer the question ‘what would the aggregate demand for heating have been had historic cold snaps occurred with today’s population?’. We find that local temperatures and the inferred demand for heating per capita across the region served by the Texas Interconnection were more severe during a storm in December 1989 than during February 2021, and that cold snaps in 1951 and 1983 were nearly as severe. Given anticipated population growth, future storms may lead to even greater infrastructure failures if adaptive investments are not made. Further, electricity system managers should prepare for trends in electrification of heating to drive peak annual loads on the Texas Interconnection during severe winter storms.

Electricity Market Design and Zero-Marginal Cost Generation

“…The exceptional emergency during February 2021 remains a subject of important further study and investigation as part of the regulatory review [12,13]. However, the weather conditions were a one-in-fifty year event [14], so extreme and well outside the traditional one-in-ten year reliability standard that it is not clear that any electricity system design would have fared well [15].…”

Winter Climate Variability, De-Icing Salt and Streetside Tree Vitality

“…This phenomenon has created severe winter storm events in cities that have not, historically, experienced substantial accumulations of snow and ice (Cohen et al, 2014(Cohen et al, , 2021. Examples of note include the Eurasia "Beast from the East" in March 2018 and winter storm Uri in February 2021 (Overland and Wang, 2019;Overland et al, 2020;Doss-Gollin et al, 2021). Increased knowledge of how climate change influences the CPV (Kim et al, 2014;Lillo et al, 2021) suggests that the unexpected should be the expected where Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude winter weather is concerned.…”

International airports as agents of resilience

“…In comparison to the 2011 freeze, initial de‐icing and runway clearance operations were robust and continued at normal levels for 4 days. However, cascading failures due to power grid outages, water line breaks, extreme cold impacts on equipment and the ability of staff to get to work eventually led to the system failure level similar to 2011 (Doss‐Gollin et al, 2021). Operational capacity took much longer to recover (7 vs. 3 days), indicating that post‐2011 investment did not confer systemwide resilience sufficiently to recover swiftly the disrupted operating capacity of the airport.…”