El Paso Power [2021 Winter Storm]

El Paso Power [2021 Winter Storm]

Hi and welcome to Living in El Paso, Texas. My name is John Peña, and on this episode we're going to talk about this last week in February 2021 and the power grid and the cold temperatures. Hi, my name is John Peña. I'm a real estate agent in El Paso, Texas, and this YouTube channel is all about El Paso. Eat, sleep, work, play. If that's the kind of thing you're

interested in, please consider subscribing to the channel. And let's just go ahead and jump right into it. So this week, as you probably know, you definitely know if you've been living in Texas and even outside of Texas if you've been watching the news, you've seen that on the weekend we had a pretty severe temperature drop. A big cold front came down

on top of us, and in a nutshell it pretty much wreaked havoc on the majority of Texas. There are plenty of folks, unfortunately, Austin, Houston, Dallas area, who have been out of power, millions of people actually, who have been out of power for days now, and they've also had to deal with really frigid temperatures. As you can imagine, if it's 20 degrees, 10 degrees at night,

and you don't have electricity, if you don't have a heat source, that's going to make for some pretty, that's going to make for some pretty serious suffering and a lot of misery for folks. So our hearts and prayers go out to all of those folks who are affected by that, and I hope that things start looking up for them sooner than later. But for this particular episode in relation

to El Paso, it's provided actually a really unique opportunity for me to speak to those people who might be interested in relocating here, or who are, you know, thinking potentially about a move here, or just want to know what's happening in El Paso. It was a unique opportunity for me to learn a little bit more about our power grid and where our energy comes from, and I think it's going to

be a pretty fitting episode. So it's funny, sometimes I feel guilty about these episodes not being that entertaining, but hopefully to the right people, information is valuable, and that's really what I'm trying to do here for you. So Texas is the biggest energy producing state in the United States. This means that Texas produces more energy on its own than any other state. So

in West Texas, in particular, we are sitting on pretty serious oil reserves. So we have oil, Texas is known for drilling for oil, right? Natural gas, we have wind, solar, on El Paso we generate a lot of solar, being the sun city. So as far as states go, Texas, which is a huge state, does however produce a lot, a lot of energy. According to Wikipedia, our favorite research

source, the United States power grid is made up of two major grids and then three minor grid systems. And so the Western Interconnection is what they call them. The Western Interconnection is a wide area synchronous grid and one of the two major alternating current, or AC, power grids in the continental U.S. power transmission grid. So the other major power grid essentially is the

Eastern Interconnection. So you can see here on the map in the west, we've got the Western Interconnection, which is an entire large system of electricity grids for AC power for those science nerds out there. And then the eastern side of the country, it has its own system of grids. It includes a lot, a number of states, right, that are all sort of interconnected. So those are the two primary

power grids in the United States. Now there are three minor interconnections, or three minor power grids, that play a role here in producing power for the country. Quebec has its own power grid, that some of that goes into the United States. Alaska has a power grid interconnection system. And Texas has its own interconnection, or power grid. Texas has its own power grid, but not

all parts of the state use it. And this is where it gets interesting. El Paso is not actually part of the Texas power grid. There are parts of the Upper Panhandle in Texas that aren't part of it, and there are a couple of parts in East Texas that are not part of that Texas interconnection, or Texas power grid. So about 90% of Texas does use power, and is dependent on power, from the

Texas power grid. This includes all those towns, unfortunately, those big towns that are suffering, like we mentioned, Austin, Dallas, Houston, right. But 90% of Texas uses that power grid, and then there's about 10%, including El Paso, that does not. Okay, so what's the main reason that the grid failed? The main reason that the grid failed is, by the way, all of this information,

most of it is coming from an article that the Texas Tribune did, so want a full disclosure there. But the grid, the Texas grid, failed because of failures across Texas's natural gas operations and supply chains due to the extreme temperatures. Now not only because of the natural gas, you know, there's pictures and stories of frozen natural gas wells, and natural gas is largely what Texans

rely on for their power and their heat generation, especially in the winter, but it included all power sources. There were failures across all power sources, including wind. There's images and stories of frozen wind turbines, and so I've seen a little bit of stuff back and forth in the media trying to blame this energy source or this energy source. According to the Texas Tribune,

it was essentially failures across all of our power systems. Okay, so that's what happened. Okay, so most people then kind of want to know, okay, well why did that happen? Why wasn't the Texas power grid capable of handling low temperatures? You know, why was it at risk of doing exactly what everybody feared? Maybe not too many people expected it to happen,

but, you know, it did fail. So, you know, essentially who's to blame here? What's the problems on a different level? I found a couple of reasons. Again, Texas Tribune, number one, that there are limited regulations on the companies in the Texas power grid that generate power. Okay, so there's not a lot of...since Texas is its own power grid, it's not...it doesn't have to

listen to what the federal government says it needs to do, right? Number two, a history of isolating Texas from federal oversight. Exactly what I just said. Since Texas has its own system, they're kind of able to tell the government, the federal government, hey, you know, we got it, leave us alone. Number three, Texas did not require equipment upgrades to withstand extreme winter temperatures.

So somebody, either elected officials or heads of companies, somebody did not require upgrades to the equipment so that it could handle extreme temperatures like we saw this week. The fourth reason why this may have happened, Texas decided to operate mostly isolated from the other grids in the United States, which means, you know, if we would have been able to maybe share power with

another grid, then maybe that could have offset some of the strain on the system. Again, I am certainly no expert on this, but these are the reasons that were suggested. Okay, so what about the other grids? The western interconnection, the eastern interconnection. These grids, essentially, they were equipped to withstand the cold temperatures, and so what happened essentially

is that Texas, you know, it experienced this extreme change in temperature, big mess with supply chains, big mess with freezing equipment, but it does sound like, you know, something possibly could have been done, and I'm sure now this will probably be a wake-up call. So let's go ahead, though, and transition into El Paso and our kind of history of our power.

So this is what I found out. El Paso's power was originally all local, but they started pursuing other resources in the 1960s as the population grew. They used a power that was generated from a New Mexico power plant, and in the late 1970s, El Paso Electric, that's our electric company, became part owner of the Palo Verde nuclear generating station in Arizona. I didn't explore

that too much more, but it does seem to imply that some of our energy is coming through or from nuclear. El Paso is part of the western grid, and so the question came up, you know, why? Why is El Paso? Did they choose to be part of the western? Did they choose not to be part of Texas? Did Texas kick them out? And what I found out is that this is according to folks high up in El

Paso Electric, because El Paso is so far west in Texas, it just makes more economical sense, the company thought, kind of to have El Paso belong to this western interconnection simply based on its location. Somebody was quoted in an article I read, you know, it takes less travel time to get to LA from El Paso than it does to Houston, and the implication

being that, you know, El Paso is already kind of so far west anyway, it just made more sense to to be part of this, so for what it's worth. Now, I don't want to imply that El Paso is perfect, okay, so did a little more research. In 2011, I guess there was a very hard freeze. I was not here at that point, and I guess that hard freeze left the city without power and water, so El Paso officials

made several critical decisions after that storm to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future. Now, if you are really a living in El Paso, Texas know-it-all, then you know that we actually, El Paso had a similar situation with the big flood a while back, where it was a realization like, hey, we need to upgrade our infrastructure and prepare so that we don't have

this catastrophic failure, which is exactly what they did. I've shown you in previous videos the reservoir holding ponds for water, all the canals that if we get tons of rain, the water will be transported to where it needs to go. We're able to take off tons of houses from the flood registry, so another example of El Paso as a city being proactive, right? So at that point, the equipment

was not capable of withstanding low temperatures as low as negative 10 degrees, okay, but what they did is they've now upgraded the equipment to be capable of withstanding down to negative 10 degrees. They've done better insulation, better weatherization, and I guess at that point the power station that failed is on the east side. It's called the Montana Power Station,

but it turns out not only did they make improvements, but they decided to build another power plant, understanding that it was pretty difficult to try to retrofit a plant that was 50 to 60 years old, so they built another plant. So again, all that stuff costs money, but these are the investments in infrastructure that you want. This is why El Paso, you know, we had very, very

cold weather here, but you know, we didn't have any blackouts, no blackouts. What we did have, according to El Paso Electric, 875 customers were impacted by a power outage of less than five minutes, okay? The panhandle sounds like they had some short rolling blackouts that were very minimal, but El Paso, 875 people that had power outages that lasted no more than five minutes,

right? So pretty interesting. I think it speaks well to our city, and I think it speaks well to common sense and maybe a bit of luck, right? So some common sense that city officials, the electric company, have made pretty wise decisions, and they were at least able to, you know, skirt any tragedy here, as unfortunately, you know, other cities in Texas were not. So in El Paso

we did very, very well. We're very fortunate. I'm going to take you on a real quick tour of the damage that happened to me. It's very light and minimal, and other than that, thank you so much for tuning in. I've heard from a lot of you that were really interested in the real estate market update, which really gives me hope because when new relocating buyers reach out to me and

they've watched a video like that, you're already a step ahead of other buyers because you're already more educated than some of the local buyers, quite honestly. So that I found really enjoyable. I'm so glad that people are seemingly finding some value in the channel, and with that let me go ahead and show you the damage that we sustained.

The only issues that we had during the storm, ironically, on Sunday, which was probably the worst day for us. We did get some snow. It was very cold. On Sunday we woke up, and this is a little bit of our own fault because our furnace had been acting a little bit squirrelly lately, but it had been going along. We thought maybe the thermostat was not working, but turned out on

Sunday, the coldest day of this storm, with the snow and everything, turns out our furnace stopped working. Of course, this is a nightmare because now you have to call somebody to come out and fix it on a Sunday, which we did do. As you can imagine, there were a number of people reaching out with issues. It might have been maintenance that they had just been putting off for a long

time, and now they really wanted to get that heat on because nobody wanted their pipes to freeze at night, right? So we called around, and believe it or not, we had a gentleman come out to our furnace, get our furnace working in less than an hour. His hourly rate was $135 an hour, which is exactly what we paid. So we paid in El Paso to have our heater fixed on a Sunday on

probably the coldest, most miserable day of the year, so far at least, for about $135. So we felt pretty good about that, and the other casualty that the winter has had on us here in El Paso, I'm afraid, is this poor cactus, which we brought all the way from Florida, and man, he was doing great for a while, but a Florida cactus just may not may not be made for El Paso. So

thank you so much. Bye-bye.