Yes, there is a risk for anything. And there are limitations to pretty much everything. The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, and thermal generators need servicing and have to be taken off line. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things that can be done to improve reliability.
The prime issue in Texas is the failure of the natural gas system. Not solar. Not wind. Wind was about 1GW of the 64GW of power online before it went offline. Texas, via ERCOT, chose cheap natural gas driven electrical power. After a similar freeze event in February of 2011, ERCOT was told by FERC in 2011 to improve their natural gas based electrical power generation by winterizing the natural gas system, and how to do it. ERCOT did not winterize their natural gas systems. In the wintertime, surprise, homes use lots of natural gas for heating, so there is increased natural gas demands from residential customers, on top of the demand from the electrical power generators. Now in 2021, ten years later, natural gas wells froze, pumping stations froze, distribution systems froze, and as a result a large chunk of the Texas natural gas fueled electricity production went off line. Lack of electrical power took even more natural gas off line. This disaster was a predictable and predicted event. Clearly there are now folks in Texas that are rethinking that.
I would suggest that the point many Texans are learning the hard way is that you can't rely on utilities 100% of the time. Electricity, natural gas, water. Nothing is perfect, but some are less perfect than others. Right now Texas is a great example of less than perfect, isn't it? My current electricity provider, who is also a natural gas supplier, is definitely less than perfect. Since I can't force them to make good (better?) decisions, I own two generators, and we are adding Powerwall battery backup to our solar. Would I do it if they averaged only 48 minutes of downtime a year? Probably not. (That is what the UK national electric grid averages. The US average is three hours, not counting weather events.)
Would it be better for my utility to put in batteries and improve their grid quality via investments in things like rapid shutdown isolators? Definitely! They would get a much, much better deal. But they aren't doing that, which brings us back to this thread and Powerwalls.
I have lived in a number of states, and I can say that I have seen the utilities fail first hand in most of them. We had a really dry winter one year in the upper Midwest and the frost went down from the normal 3' down to 8-12', freezing lots of water lines, ours included. It also caused the natural gas supply to go out, despite being "winterized". I don't think it has happened again there since, but my point is that out of the ordinary weather events, and failures happen with regularity. A facility that I worked at, which generated most of its own power, had two squirrels meet in the switching unit to the main grid. Bang! No power from the grid, and no power from the local generators. Luckily there was one switch in Delaware and they were able to truck it over and install it in something like ten days. Absent the one spare, it was forecast to have been a three to six month down time. Improbable events definitely happen. After the event, pest control and backup backup generators got a lot more attention...
More recently, one of the major electrical suppliers in Southern California that I had to deal with had some outages caused by tree to line shorts and put in rapid shutdown isolators, and their grid reliability improved dramatically. Common events. The prime Northern California electrical supplier (mine) was asked to add isolators at the same time but balked at the cost. The Northern California utility has since gone bankrupt, been convicted of felonies, and is on the hook for billions of losses. Which was the right call? In hindsight, the isolators look really cheap.
Risk mitigation is a trade off; less preventative investment, more failures, more folks in distress. Not everyone thinks through the risks, or is in a position to correctly evaluate the risks. I think that misinformation leads many people astray. Garbage in, garbage out.
All the best,
Peter
