I have been asked recently if West Virginia could suffer the same kind of outages that Texas has. The short answer is no.
I don’t want to minimize the difficulties our fellow West Virginians have suffered because of outages caused by the recent ice storms. Our outages in West Virginia were just as devastating to customers as the Texas outages, but the reasons for the outages were completely different. Southwestern West Virginia was the victim of two serious back-to-back ice storms that weighed down power lines and trees, causing widespread failure of electricity distribution lines. The Texas outages were caused by an inability of the Texas power plants to generate sufficient electricity to meet the state’s needs.
There are several important differences between the reliability and resilience of the power supply in Texas and West Virginia, including transmission interconnection, the design and construction of power plants from the standpoint of unusually cold weather, and the reliability and certainty of generation fuel.
Texas has chosen to have a single state reliability area with no significant transmission interconnection lines that would allow it to import power from neighboring states. As opposed to Texas, most electric utilities outside of Texas not only have large interconnections between neighboring utilities but also are part of large interconnected regional reliability systems. West Virginia is part of a large interconnected transmission system that spans from the Atlantic coast as far west as Chicago. This large interconnected area allows power to be transported among a great number of utilities within the system.
In Texas, power plants are not designed to withstand significant and extended freezing conditions. This saved money on construction costs but left the plants susceptible to freezing weather. In West Virginia, our electric boiler and generation facilities are placed inside protective structures. This allows winterization that protects feed lines, cooling water lines, pumps and other freeze-sensitive equipment that is critical to the operation of steam-powered generators.
Generally speaking, power plants that can most readily be relied on to continue to generate if their fuel supply is interrupted are, in the order of reliability starting with the most reliable: nuclear; coal; oil; natural gas; water; and solar/wind. In West Virginia, coal-fired generation currently represents approximately 90% of the installed capacity, while natural gas represents approximately 8%.
By contrast, Texas relies on the following generation fuel mix: 45.7% gas; 22.9% wind; 18% coal; 10.9% nuclear; 2.4% solar; and less than 1% hydro.
Rest assured, the Public Service Commission of West Virginia will continue to monitor and investigate distribution line reliability and resilience, but our state is not vulnerable to the same kind of massive outage catastrophe at the power plant level that Texas has endured
