Learning from the 2021 Texas Grid Failure: Optimizing Cost, Carbon Emissions and Reliability of Future Renewable

In February of 2021 during a major winter storm, Texas suffered a massive electrical grid failure, leaving millions of Americans without power for multiple days. The occurrence of blackouts such as this one indicates that there is a need for continuous improvement in the efficiency and reliability of electrical grids. The accelerating effects of climate change are causing severe weather patterns to occur more frequently, and this trend puts electrical grids at further risk of failure. Expanding the use of renewable energy as a fuel source will help to gradually mitigate the effects of climate change. Our case study aimed to address the following scientific question: What is the optimal renewable energy grid in Texas to reduce the severity of future grid failures, carbon emissions, and financial cost? We hypothesize that a wider distribution of the types of renewable energy sources used will increase reliability, produce less carbon emissions and be the most cost-effective. We created a calculator to display our predictive models of the trends for cost, carbon emissions, and reliability given the model for how the energy source distribution of the grid infrastructure changes on a yearly basis and tested two scenarios to determine how the changing infrastructure in those cases would affect infrastructural/consumer-based costs, carbon emissions, and reliability during a grid failure. We concluded that tradeoffs exist between the three factors for both of these scenarios, such as that a higher percentage of renewable energy leads to high reliability during a grid failure and low carbon emissions, but it also has higher consumer price and infrastructural costs.