According to U.S. media on the 16th, as of 9:40 ET on the 16th, the winter storm in the United States has caused power outages for more than 5.5 million households in the United States, and power supply companies have been forced to carry outages in turn.
Among them, more than 4 million households in Texas were cut off from electricity. Why is there a widespread power outage in Texas?
According to the reporter, the winter storm set many historical records in Texas, including snowfall. The main power supply of Texas’s power grid is wind and natural gas, mainly in response to the surge in electricity demand during the hot summer.
But winter storms also caused a surge in electricity consumption, but wind power plants and natural gas power plants were unable to operate at full capacity due to weather reasons, resulting in power shortages.
The Texas Power Reliability Board, which is responsible for power distribution, has declared a statewide power shortage emergency, requiring power supply companies to reduce grid pressure through staged power outages.
The head of the “Electricity Reliability Committee” said that 34,000 megawatts of power generation must be offline due to extreme weather, which accounts for one-third of the electricity generation of the whole system.
This weather is “far more than the design to deal with extreme weather in Texas”. University of Houston professor criticizes that insufficient investment in electricity has led to a failure to deal with it well.
What impact will this winter storm have on the prevention and control of COVID-19 in the United States?
The most impact is the vaccine, the first is transportation, and the second is vaccination. Affected by the weather, the transportation of coronavirus vaccine in many states in the United States has been delayed and continues to expand to the east.
For example, the time of COVID-19 vaccination in Georgia needs to be re-booked. Due to power shortages, one vaccine storage site in Texas was cut off, causing 8,000 doses of vaccines to be invalid; the vaccine centers in Texas, Alabama and Kentucky were also forced to close and will last for some time.
Extreme cold waves hit the southern United States and sounded not like global warming, but experts believe that it is indeed caused by global warming.
Usually, cold air in the Arctic will be blocked by high-altitude rapids and cannot go south, but global warming causes the rapids to weaken, causing cold air to escape.
Some experts believe that between 2008 and 2018, the extreme winter weather in the United States intensified. Although the appearance is not global warming, it is related to global warming.
