Blackout: Is Texas Preparing to Repeat Last Year’s Disaster?
Winter 2021 meant blackouts and pain for Texas, and is likely to repeat itself this year. In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered a severe energy crisis, linked to three severe winter storms that hit the US on February 10-11, February 13-17, and February 15-20. The storms caused a huge disruption of electricity production in the state of Texas, leading to shortages of water, food and heat. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left without electricity, some for several days. At least 210 people died from causes directly or indirectly related to the blackout.
Now the situation is not exactly calm in the "Lone Star" state. In fact, the production of natural gas, essential for dealing with emergency energy crises if ecological sources, wind, were to fail.
There is also the problem of exports: a substantial part of the liquid natural gas arriving in Europe comes precisely from those areas, where it is taking advantage of the high prices in the old continent. The differential has increased permian production, which is good for Texas, but since this gas then goes by ship, not that much.
Meanwhile, we are heading for the cold, both in Texas
Both in the rest of the USA
So Texas is facing a sharp rise in energy demand, while the other states are also rising.
A drop in gas supplies comes soon after Texas' Electric Reliability Council (ERCOT) said the electricity grid is " winter-ready and ready to supply power ." However, this statement was similar to others made last year. A series of snowstorms, such as those that occurred in 2021, perhaps followed by a drop in wind production, could still lead to a crisis followed by Blackout, precisely due to the decline in natural gas production.
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The Blackout article : Is Texas preparing to repeat last year's disaster? comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/blackout-il-texas-si-prepara-a-ripetere-il-disastro-dello-scorso-anno/ on Tue, 04 Jan 2022 11:00:41 +0000.