House
Whisperer
by Nate Adams
34 | February 2021
I'm Giving Texas All She's Got, Captain!
A
s I write this, Texas is just
star ting to get most of its
power back. Fingers are being
pointed all over the place—
some are blaming wind turbines, some
are blaming natural gas; consumers are
blaming utilities and the grid manager,
ERCOT; some pundits are blaming Texas'
unusual market-based grid. Meanwhile,
everyone is miserable.
I'm reminded of Scotty in all of the
"Star Trek" iterations exclaiming with a
heavy Scottish brogue "I'm giving her all
she's got, Captain!" Somehow, the show
always patched the Enterprise together
before it blew up. The Texas grid wasn't
so lucky.
The truth of the matter is the Texas
grid is a machine pushed well beyond
anything it was designed for and it broke.
Badly. In almost every way. For a clear-
eyed view, check out Jesse Jenkins' tweets
around 2/14-2/18.
Health Consequences
Obviously, grid stability is not the
usual focus of my writing. (That said,
I listen to and have been on the
Cleantech podcast, The Energy Gang,
and am par t of #energytwitter.)
Unfor tunately, the grid is not the only
thing that blew up. Water lines every-
where are bursting because homes are
seeing temperatures never seen before,
combined with the heat being out. This is
worsening an already bad situation and
will make for a lot of cleanup and likely
future mold issues.
Even sadder is carbon monoxide
poisoning is happening on an unprece-
dented scale as homeowners are trying
to find some way to heat their homes.
How do we prevent this from hap-
pening again? The fix looks remarkably
like the future we're moving towards.
The Fix is the Future
If the root of the multiple failures in Texas
is systems (both the grid and build-
ings) being pushed well beyond what
they were designed for, then the
fix is increasing their resilience.
Renewable energy costs have fallen
precipitously over the last decade, solar is
down 89% for example. Very shor tly
(if not already), renewable energy is going
to be the cheapest energy source man
has ever known—it doesn't require fuel!
These economics are becoming
obvious in "interconnection queues" or
what's planned by utilities to be built in
the next few years. New England's queue
is 95% renewables now, mainly because
of economics. Many grids are more than
80 percent. Like it or not, clean energy
is coming.
The same argument can be made for
tighter and better insulated homes as the
2015 IECC code now requires blower
door testing and passing to either 3 air
changes per hour at 50 pascals in colder
climates or 5 ACH50 in milder ones. The
future is better homes.
Back to Texas and the electric grid
in general, the way to reduce the risk
of a repeat looks a lot like what we just
discussed:
Better houses
Tighter better insulated homes lose
heat more slowly, buying time before
frozen pipes or abandoning the home.
Retrofits will be key here as they
are 98-99 percent of the market.
More efficient HVAC can reduce
power consumption, but still put out heat
in emergencies. Normally it can deliver
excellent comfor t and air quality. This
Here's a photo of a
ceiling destroyed
by a burst pipe
courtesy of HVAC
2.0 contractor
Dustin Cole in Lake
Charles, La., which
is also experiencing
freezing pipes.
