The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables By Irina Slav - Mar 03, 2021, 4:00 PM CST Join Our Community The blame game for the massive power outages in Texas last month continues. The dominant argument is that renewables had an ignorable part to play in the crisis, with natural gas.
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The U.S. Grid Isn’t Ready For A Major Shift To Renewables By Irina Slav - Mar 03, 2021, 4:00 PM CST
The blame game for the massive power outages in Texas last month continues. The dominant argument is that renewables had an ignorable part to play in the crisis, with natural gas and coal the indirect culprits due to their reduced availability resulting from infrastructure freezing and diverting supplies for heating purposes.
Yet what the real problem actually lies in, not just in Texas but everywhere where energy demand is growing, is grid reliability and resiliency. When it comes to the U.S. electrical grid, it is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses, Westhaven Power, a California utility, told Oilprice.