Is the Texas Grid Ready for a Winter Storm?

Current conditions: Strong Santa Ana winds are bringing dangerous fire threats to Southern California • Heavy rainfall triggered severe floods in Mecca, Saudi Arabia • More than 2,300 flights were cancelled in the U.S. yesterday due to extreme winter weather.

THE TOP FIVE

1. New winter storm threatens southern states

At least five people have died in the brutal winter storm slamming the U.S. Most of the deaths were due to traffic accidents and dangerous driving conditions. Power outages continue in some of the hardest hit states, with nearly 200,000 customers in the dark across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. There’s little relief in sight, with temperatures expected to remain bitterly cold, and another storm already forming. The new system threatens to bring snow and ice to the South by Friday. “The impending storm could deliver more than a year's worth of snow to Dallas,” according to AccuWeather. The good news is that Texas’ grid operator, ERCOT, isn’t worried. It issued a “weather watch” earlier this week through the 10th, forecasting higher electricity demand, but said “grid conditions are expected to be normal.”

AccuWeather

2. Trump says he will reverse Biden’s drilling ban ‘immediately’

President-elect Donald Trump blasted President Biden’s sweeping ban on offshore drilling, saying in a radio interview that he had the “right to unban it immediately.” He accused the Biden administration of “doing everything possible to make the TRANSITION as difficult [as] possible.” Trump has promised to “drill, baby, drill” and expand domestic oil production once he takes office. But he will have a hard time reversing Biden’s offshore drilling ban without an act of Congress, which may prove elusive since some lawmakers in coastal states want to prevent drilling along their shorelines. Most of the regions affected by the ban are not of particular interest to oil and gas companies, anyway. “The U.S. is producing historic amounts of oil and gas,” noted E&E News, “and Biden’s order is unlikely to change that.”

3. Large Arizona solar project gets BLM approval

The Bureau of Land Management has approved a large solar power and battery storage project in Arizona. Once completed, the 600-megawatt Jove Solar Project in La Paz County will provide enough clean energy to power 180,000 homes. The project will cover nearly 3,500 acres, but BLM has approved a construction plan that “avoids construction within the desert wash that crosses the project, preserves the channel floodplain, maintains wildlife habitat connectivity, and avoids areas of environmental sensitivity.” In its announcement, the agency said it has approved 46 renewable energy projects on public lands since January 2021, with total capacity exceeding 34 gigawatts – well beyond the Biden administration’s goal of permitting 25 gigawatts worth of renewable energy by 2025 (the administration announced it had surpassed that goal last April).

In other approval news, the Environmental Protection Agency recently gave the green light to California’s first carbon capture and storage project. The plan is to capture CO2 from industrial operations run by California Resources Corp – an oil and gas company – and inject the gas into underground wells. “The process is energy-intensive and has a history of high profile failures,” Bloomberg noted. “Oil companies favor the technology because it allows them to potentially continue extracting and selling fossil fuels while seeking to address emissions.”

4. Climate change is hurting America’s oranges and apples

One of the country’s biggest citrus growers is walking away from the business, in part due to unrelenting hurricane damage in Florida. Alico Inc. says its citrus production has plummeted by 73% in just 10 years. It cites a rampant citrus disease called “greening,” as well as extreme weather, for the losses. “The impact of Hurricanes Irma in 2017, Ian in 2022 and Milton in 2024 on our trees, already weakened from years of citrus greening disease, has led Alico to conclude that growing citrus is no longer economically viable for us in Florida,” said John Kiernan, Alico’s president and chief executive officer. Scientists say climate change is producing more intense hurricanes. In the case of Hurricane Milton, researchers believe climate change boosted the storm’s winds by 10% and increased its rainfall by up to 30%.

Meanwhile, a study found that climate change is also hurting apple production in America, and especially in Washington, Michigan, New York. “We shouldn’t take the delicious apples we love to consume for granted,” said Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University and an author on the study. “Changing climate conditions over multiple parts of the growth cycle pose potentially compounding threats to the production and quality of apples.”

5. Study: Wildfire smoke has minimal impact on nation’s solar panels

With wildfires becoming more frequent and more extreme in the U.S. due to climate change, recent research from Colorado State University examines how the smoke from these events is affecting solar power generation. As wildfire smoke spreads, it can dim the sunlight, thus reducing the amount of solar radiation that hits a solar panel. But the new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests this effect is limited mostly to the areas nearest the fires. Even when plumes spread across state lines, “on average, smoke will not greatly affect baseline solar PV resource availability,” the study found. “PV resources remain relatively stable across most of [the continental United States] even in extreme fire seasons.”

THE KICKER

Cox Automotive anticipates that 1 in 4 vehicles sold in the U.S. this year will be electric.