Nightmare Cold Weather

Wind turbine in snow. Waldemar Brandt, Unsplash.

George Harvey

Winter at the North Pole really should have two characteristics. It should be cold, and it should be stable. Cold air gathers at the pole, the place that is farthest from the sun in winter, and because the Earth spins like a top, the winds should consistently whip along around it from west to east, in the polar vortex. That is what they should do.

The polar vortex would be nicely regular, but one thing has disturbed it. Today, temperatures at the North Pole have become a good deal warmer than they had been historically, and this has disturbed the normal pattern. With warmer temperatures at the pole, the low pressure in the vortex is less stable. Instead of spinning contentedly around the pole as a unified system, the polar vortex has been breaking into huge fragments, separate smaller polar vortices, that move away from the pole.

One part of this seems almost like a joke: No matter what direction a polar vortex moves in, in can only move south. Whether it heads toward North America, Europe, or Asia, it is moving south. It may seem very counter-intuitive, perhaps, but it is nevertheless true.

But there is another aspect of this that seems even more counter-intuitive. It is that the fragment of the polar vortex, which may bring with it record-breaking cold weather, is allowed to leave the polar regions because the temperature a the pole is higher than normal. And so, many scientists claim, the record cold weather, such as Texas recently saw, is actually a result of global warming.

The connection between record colds and global warming is further explained in an article by The Guardian, “Heating Arctic May Be to Blame for Snowstorms in Texas, Scientists Argue.” (www.bit.ly/global-warming-cold)

Unfortunately, misunderstandings about the recent cold in Texas do not stop there. Starting February 14 and February 15, the cold weather caused power outages in many places from Texas to the Canadian border, though most of the people affected by them are in Texas. Now, many people are complaining that the power outages came because wind turbines, which supply a large part of Texas’ electricity, froze and failed to function. More detail is available on this at another article by The Guardian, “US Conservatives Falsely Blame Renewables for Texas Storm Outages.” (www.bit.ly/blame-for-outages)

An article at CNN provided some added clarity on what actually happened. Plants that burn natural gas or coal, and those that use nuclear reactions, are all susceptible to cold, and many of these shut down. (www.bit.ly/CNN-Texas-blackout) While there are many reasons why this could happen, one is that water is needed for cooling, so ironically, cooling systems may fail when the water turns to ice. The biggest cause of the power outages was failures at conventional power plants.

The role of wind turbines in the Texas outages becomes clearer with closer examination. An article in MarketWatch casts some light on this. According to the article, there were some wind turbines that froze, but the amount of electricity provided by windpower was very close to what it is at this time of the year. The article is titled, “The Texas Power Disaster May Be The Strongest Case Yet for Renewable Energy.” (www.bit.ly/reason-for-renewables)

Another thing to note is that wind turbines do not generally fail in cold weather. When they failed in Texas, it was because they were not properly prepared for cold weather. This seems to have happened because utilities did not want to pay for something that only rarely happens. Underscoring the ability for wind turbines to perform in cold weather is the fact that they did not fail north of Texas, in places where it was just as cold or colder. A report from Kotatv, in South Dakota, for example, said that there were power outages there, but it specifically put the blame on “non-renewable” sources of electricity. (www.bit.ly/Kotatv-report)

* This article was originally published here