Where to Listen:
In the race to transition to clean, safe energy, there are lessons to be learned just about everywhere, including in Texas.
In this episode, what January’s major winter storm is teaching us about our power grid—and the painful lesson we are all going to learn this month about natural gas.
Host:
Amy Barrilleaux
Guest:
Ciaran Gallagher, PhD, Energy & Air Manager, Clean Wisconsin
Resources for You:
Join Clean Wisconsin’s Action Network
Transcript:
Amy Hello and welcome to the Defender, Wisconsin’s environmental podcast, I’m Amy Barrilleaux. The Defender is powered by Clean Wisconsin, your environmental voice since 1970. So the title of this episode might be surprising, but in the race to transition to clean, safe energy, there are lessons to be learned just about everywhere including right now in Texas. In this episode, what January’s major winter storm is teaching us about what works and but doesn’t work when our power grid is tested. And the painful lesson we’re all going to learn this month about natural gas. That’s right now on The Defender. It’s time to brace ourselves when we open our power and heating bills this month. It’s going to be bad news, really bad. Joining me is Clean Wisconsin energy and air manager Ciaran Gallagher to talk about the winter storm and deep freeze that just swept across the country and what it means for all of us. Kieran, thanks so much for being here.
Ciaran You’re welcome.
Amy First, I want to start off with what’s happening, what happened with this winter storm that’s now going to be making. Us probably have to dig a little deeper to pay for our energy bills.
Ciaran Gas prices spiked considerably this past weekend and all this week. While people were stocking up on canned goods and staying home to take care of kids without school, utilities and grid operators really bracing for a stress case of the electricity grid. And while there’s still more to learn about how the electricity grid fared during this. Recent winter storm fern, one of our takeaways is that gas prices went up considerably. These fuel prices are going to be passed on to consumers both in their residential heating bills and since many utilities also burn gas for power plants, you’ll also see that passed on through your electricity bill.
Amy And, oh, that’s something I didn’t get, you know? I was thinking, okay, it’s the heating, it’s heating bill that’s gonna go up, the gas. I think when you’re in this climate and you think about gas and you’re thinking about heating you forget about the electricity. So we rely on gas power plants also to create our electricity and that’s going to go up too.
Ciaran Yes, exactly. There’s really an imbalance of supply and demand during these winter storms and these extreme cold weather events. Because it’s so cold, gas heating demand is really high, and electricity demand also goes up, and there’s competition between those two sectors. And at the same time, these freezing conditions… Can really disrupt production and transportation of gas, especially to power plants. So frozen pipelines and other infrastructure can really increase the prices for both heating and power plants
Amy Oh, go ahead. I was just going to be frustrated, but I’ll let you finish and then you can hear my frustrations.
Ciaran We know that at least on the East Coast, a number of gas power plants went down. They had forced outages because the extreme cold was affecting the plants themselves. And then there are many other gas power plans that can also burn oil and diesel. And we’re seeing reports that many of these plants did burn these dirtier, expensive fuels simply because they didn’t have available gas.
Amy I think this is important for people to know because if you’re in Wisconsin and you’re listening to what our energy utilities are saying, basically, well, we can’t move to 100% wind and solar because we need to be reliable. We need to have, you know, keep the lights on 24 hours a day when we need the things when the sun’s not shining, the wind’s not blowing. I mean, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard that. I’m sure you have too. But you don’t hear, oh, but when it gets really cold. Everything shuts down or when it gets really cold, get ready for your heating bills and your electric bills to get sky high. You don’t hear that. All you keep hearing is, well, gas is reliable, but it doesn’t feel like if power plants on the East Coast have got to burn oil and diesel, that that’s really true. I mean, is it kind of like we’re being just sold some, we use the term being natural gas lit, like we are just being told a line.
Ciaran Yeah, I think early indications are showing that once again gas plants does not equate reliability during these winter storms and extreme cold spells. There’s been a little, I have found a little bit more information on Texas, which a lot of energy experts were really looking at during this storm because Five years ago, a winter storm, Yuri, devastated the state. Four million people were without power. Hundreds died. People without power were so cold, they were turning on their barbecues in their indoor spaces as a heating source, which is just incredibly dangerous. And since then, Texas… Leads the nation in renewables and storage development. There’s complicated reasons for this. They’re a little bit of the Wild West when it comes to adding resources. They don’t do the same type of analysis that the Midwest grid operator, MISO, or other neighboring regional grid operators do. But because of that, they have added gigawatts of solar, wind and batteries. Faster than any other state in these last five years. Specifically, they’ve added 14 gigawatts of storage, which can power about 10 million homes for two to four hours. In comparison, the Midwest grid operator that ranges from Minnesota, Iowa, all the way to Indiana and Michigan, down south to Louisiana and Mississippi. Only had about one gigawatts of solar deployed in this, across this whole massive territory. And we’re seeing that battery storage did come, did come in considerably during this winter storm, especially in some early mornings when the sun hasn’t risen yet and wind production may have been lower. So battery storage seems to have really helped Texas weather this winterstorm. In comparison, during this storm five years ago, they were really heavily dependent on mostly gas power plants. And these power plants were not used to this cold weather that they received, and everything froze. Gas power plants, pipelines froze, and there were these cascading outages that were controlled and led to the millions without power for many days. And so I’ve seen some takeaways from looking at how Texas fared five years ago to how Texas faired this year, is that it’s more about a diversification of resources that gas did produce a lot. They weatherized a lot of their power plants, so there were much fewer outages, but solar, wind, and battery storage all helped cover the weaknesses of each resource. So this diversification of sources is something that utilities don’t talk much about. They like to put all their eggs in the gas power plant basket. And I think that Texas shows that that is a dangerous way to plan for your resources moving forward.
Amy I mean, it’s unusual, I think, for Wisconsin to be looking at Texas as a model of how they should deal with the winter because it’s Texas. And honestly, my sister lives in Texas, and when that storm happened, she and a whole lot of people also lost water because their pipes in their homes froze because it was so cold they didn’t have heat. So that heat, losing the heat is a cascading. Issue and then when you don’t have water then you really have problems. They also had frozen water mains and all kinds of stuff happening in Texas. So one thing I want to get at though is that cost, right? Because we’re in Wisconsin. We handle the winter storm just like we always do. It’s cold. We put on our hats and gloves and get out there. But we’re going to be feeling the impacts from this winter storm. That hit the rest of the nation just as much in terms of cost, like that’s going to come to us, is that right?
Ciaran Yes, gas fuel is volatile. We have experienced some lower fuel prices over the last few years, some historic lows in this fuel. And at the same time, anytime there is an imbalance in the supply and demand, the price can really spike. I’ve seen news that says that. There were historic spikes in the cost of gas fuel this week, sometimes doubling in different regions. The federal administration’s increased pressure on wanting to export gas fuel to abroad is also putting upward pressure on this fuel at home. Without the winter storm, just in general. We have seen prices of gas to increase this in 2025 compared to 2024. And I think that’s something that utilities really need to consider when they’re making their resource decisions. I think we’ve seen some assumptions that that lower fuel price is gonna stay the same or get lower. And I think we also need to consider. What’s gonna happen if those prices just continue to increase as we’ve been seeing? What happens when you have these events where gas prices spike? How does that affect the affordability on bills and also for the utility to own that resource? Solar and wind are the cheapest sources. One of the reasons why is because their fuel, the sun and the wind are free. You just have to build the power. You just have to build the wind farm and the solar farm, and that resource, you don’t have to pay for every sunlight beam or wind breeze.
Amy I think that’s something that people still don’t know. And even if you look at our social media accounts, certainly don’t believe that wind and solar is the cheapest way to produce energy in Wisconsin. When you tell people that, do you get like, how can that be? I mean, do you get surprised?
Ciaran I get surprised and I would way I get more pushback on the, well, we can’t depend on it because it’s not always sunny and the wind is not always blowing. One other solution that I think is necessary for this clean energy transition is increasing transmission lines because it might not be sunny and windy in Madison, Wisconsin. But the sun rises earlier in Indiana and Michigan, and we share a grid with them. And it is windier, can be windier. Iowa and southern Minnesota. So having increased access to the diversity of resources both in types types of resources and geographically can help with balancing of those individual limitations. I also have to say that it’s kind of predictable that the sun does rise and the sun does set and that’s something that we can plan for and predict. I know that forecasting of how much wind output there’s going to be in the next few days is something that the Midwest grid operator is increasingly having to consider. Having like predicting wind that wind is going to peak, when is it going to lower? And as we add more battery storage to the grid, can they hold off? Battery storage until the morning when everyone’s waking up and the wind has dipped and the sun isn’t quite shining high in the sky yet. Let’s turn on the batteries. So there’s this coordination of weather forecasters and experts with the grid that will be increasingly important moving forward. This is complex. It says a lot of computer models, mathematical models, engineering that is necessary, but it is possible. And it’s something that can be done. There are energy grids that have higher renewables on their system and do work well, that do function, that do have reliable systems. Um, and I think There is a tendency for utilities, and I also think from MISO, the grid operator, to be conservative in how they approach these complex issues. I think they are used to turning on power plants when electricity demand goes up. That’s easier to do. But we are faced with this existential issue of climate change that is causing worse extreme weather, it’s causing flooding, it is causing heat waves that are harming people and our farmers and our businesses and we have to meet the moment of that incredible challenge with creativity and flexibility in our utility operations.
Amy It does feel like Texas has done a better job of meeting the moment right now than we are, because not only have they got this really massive amount of battery storage that you talked about that helped them get through this winter storm, they’ve also got a whole lot of wind power that they’re relying on now. So is it surprising to you that a state that you don’t think of as maybe at the forefront of clean energy technology Is at the forefront of clean energy technology, and we’re not?
Ciaran Yeah, I mean, let’s be clear. None of that is from a state mandate. This state government did not say we want more solar and wind because of climate change. Rather, it was pure economics. Economics reign supreme in Texas. They have a pretty deregulated state in their electricity industry. Texas is unique in that because their electricity grid does not cross state borders, there are no federal regulations. So that’s kind of why they’re the Wild West. And they have shown that adding resources and studying them after they’ve added the resources is a system that’s working. And I think other Other regions are starting to take notice at what Texas is doing. Across the United States, we’re having, we have these long queues, basically long lines of developers that want to add solar and wind and storage to the electricity grid in Wisconsin, in MISO, across the United states, and they’re in the waiting for years and years to be exhaustively steady. There are reasons to do these studies. It’s to make sure that the transmission system flows correctly, but Texas has developed a system that skips that study at the front end and kind of does it more on the back end. And as data centers are increasing pressure on regulators and federal lawmakers makers and. The presidential administration and utilities, I think we’re seeing greater strain on how fast can we get resources? I wish that it didn’t have to wait till data centers to come to this conclusion that, huh, the way we’re doing things isn’t exactly working. But that might be one bright silver lining in this rush to data centers is that it’s causing utilities, grid operators, and other energy experts to actually put their creative thinking hats on.
Amy You mentioned data centers, and I think there is a rush to meet what’s going to be this huge amount of demand all over the place, including in Wisconsin. It seems like in Wisconsin right now that rush to meat demand is playing out in more gas, right? Like there’s sort of this fast track thing that’s happening where we’ve already got gas plant that’s under construction for the Microsoft Data Center. And now there’s some others that have gotten to jump in the queue, jump in front of wind and jump in from wind in front solar, the two, as we mentioned, cheapest ways to produce energy in Wisconsin. Why is that happening? Why does gas get to, we’re seeing gas is not ideal, especially when we open our energy bills next month. Why are they getting this jump ahead in line card?
Ciaran That’s a great question, Amy. It befuddles me. Regulators, MISO operators, they view gas as being more reliable, which we are showing is not always the case. And we’re seeing they have these thoughts that these projects are more concrete. There has been an issue with the developers putting in some placeholder projects and these cues to get added to the grid, which means sometimes projects drop out. So they think that these gas power plant projects are more readily, are going, are have a higher likelihood of being built. However, we are seeing that some of those projects that went through this fast tracking, huge jumping lane have already dropped out. We are saying that those assumptions are not exactly becoming fulfilled. So it’s something that we are challenging in court right now. It’s something we have opposed since it was first printed. Proposed by myself and is something that I think just needs to get increasing attention that there are so many projects that want to connect to our grid that are hoping to get tax credits before they expire that were killed by the Trump administration. Let’s Let’s add more than one gigawatt of storage across nine plus states. But we are seeing an entrenchment in the old school ways of doing things, which is let’s add gas, let’s turn our power plants on. I think winter storms like Uri and this last week’s storm fern highlights how some of these assumptions. Are false, and it highlights some of the reliability issues with gas. It’s unfortunate that people have to lose power for energy experts to realize this again and again and again. So I want to note that there’s still more to learn from Winter Storm Fern. We We don’t have all the information and all the… The data yet, but I think. Gas does not equate reliability. And I think that’s just, I feel like a broken record whenever I mention winter storms in face of that comment. And sometimes it’s heard and sometimes it goes on deaf ears.
Amy When we talk about certainly reliability and cost, I think there’s a lot going on that is impacting bills. And I think every politician in this country is starting to feel the anger of people with high bills. Certainly most people in Wisconsin have been seeing rate increases lately and there’s more to come plus the cost of just the natural gas itself. Adding to our bills. But there’s something else that’s been happening, as you mentioned earlier, Michigan and Indiana, and that is that we’re going to be having a little extra added to our bill because the Trump administration is now going in and telling coal plants that are shuttered or about to be shuttered, you got to start back up again. We have an energy emergency. Let’s start that back up. And those costs from the utility to Like, start back up and… It’s very, very expensive and it gets kind of shouldered across our little grid area that we’re in typically. So why is this happening in your mind? Why are we seeing coal plants and in some cases like there’s not even any coal left on the site and like this place is closed and then now let’s go ahead and reopen this like 40, 50, 60 year old coal plant. So why is that a strategy to deal with energy in this country?
Ciaran Yeah, and to add on the fact that there might be zero supply of coal on site, they did this for a coal plant that had been out of commission and broken for six months. And now the utility feels like they’re on the hook to put poor money into this power plant to get it online. It’s all politics. These coal power plants are not needed for system reliability. That is something that the utility, the grid operator, and the state regulators have all agreed on. We do sometimes see coal plants that have announced retirement dates that the grid operator has identified as needing to stay on. And there are exceptions to mean that they have to go past, beyond their stated retirement date. These plans are not those. These are political decisions being made over the experts in the state and the region who really actually know about the reliability of the system. And it is all politics because coal is favored by this administration. Because they get big donations from coal industry and they are trying to prop up a dying industry one coal plant at a time. These coal plants are retiring because they are inefficient and they’re uneconomical. It costs more to run these than the utilities can even recoup. They are polluting, causing pollution issues in nearby areas, but pollution does not they don’t rely on state boundaries and they are transporting that pollution to cities across the United States. It is a public health issue, it is an affordability issue, and it is so frustrating that the Trump administration is so proud of taking away tax credits for some of the cheapest sources of energy, wind and solar, while propping up this dying industry that is again, going to raise your electricity bills. It is going to be prohibitively expensive for the utilities in Indiana and Michigan to pass those costs on to their rate payers. So they are asking the Federal Regulatory Agency… That they can share those costs across the entire MISO North region, including Wisconsin. It is an active issue in litigation. It’s an active issue that other environmental nonprofits and attorneys are challenging that even the mechanism by which the Trump administration is extending these coal power plants And it is just a gross overreach of power that actively goes against what this administration says they care about in the electricity, regarding affordability and bills, and it does not support any reliability. I have a lot to say about it, it’s just politics.
Amy I think, yeah, you know, did you ever think, you’re somebody who, you know, works at Clean Wisconsin, you put a lot of effort into studying wind and solar and battery storage and how the grid operates and how these newer technologies can come onto the grid. Did you ever, think a couple of years ago, I’m going to be spending time talking about, talking about coal coming back onto the grid after a plant has been shut down, old, like old plants, like this is not, you know, something, it’d be like, you know, bringing your car back from the junkyard and saying, oh, I need transportation so I’m going to put my money into this. Did you ever think you were going to be here talking about resurrecting old coal plants in this way?
Ciaran No, coal produced electricity has been declining for years solely because of economics. It’s just, it is the last resource to be chosen. In a market-based dispatch. Basically, our grid operator is choosing to turn on the available generation sources that are the cheapest first. That’s solar, that’s wind, then gas, and then at the bottom, it’s coal. And it felt like our country was making great strides in reducing this inefficient, expensive fuel, and really health harming pollution. And the fact that, I mean, I’m a scientist, I like to dig into the data, I think the electricity grid is so complicated in the way it all interacts with each other. And this is an issue that is not complicated, and goes against any kind of analysis you can do.
Amy Yeah, I mean it’s another one of those nonsensical things that we are seeing happen in a crazy year and I think maybe one of the biggest, maybe it’s not nonsenical, but one of the biggest things in our conversation today is that, surprising things, is that maybe Wisconsin needs to be more like Texas. I mean I’m trying to like get my head around that. I mean, I know a lot of people in Texas. I enjoy my time there when I go. But should we learn how to, I mean, I guess, cut loose a little bit, like Texas, and to try new things and to, you know, I guess I don’t want us to be the wild, wild west, but at least try to bring in some kinds of, some new things into our energy landscape?
Ciaran Yeah, I think we can learn some things from Texas. The way their electricity is regulated is vastly different from ours. There is a lot more market competition, whereas we have monopoly utilities that have increased scrutiny from our state regulators. So I wouldn’t say we should become Texas, but I think they can learn from Texas, And I think… One of the things that we can learn the most from Texas is MISO, the grid operator, really needs to think carefully about how can you add more battery storage onto the grid. They’ve been kind of dragging their feet on that. There’s lots of wonky topics to get into there that even make my head spin, but we really just need more battery storage. Across Wisconsin and across the MISO region. There will be some hiccups and challenges, but I think that’s something that we really can learn from. Another piece of the puzzle that I haven’t mentioned yet is demand response or in the MisoGrid operator speak load modifying resources. Basically, it’s Mostly industries and businesses that get different electricity rates and in exchange for when MISO calls an emergency like they did this last weekend, these businesses and industries can decrease their electricity demand. Say they have a factory, they’ll reduce their production line by 10 or 20 percent. And this can help decrease the load peak demand that’s expected across the region. And I think we need to move towards using these resources more creatively, I think not just when we’re already in the emergency, but beforehand, I think there’s a lot more programs that can be done by utilities with rights. Residential customers. For example, do you have a smart thermostat? Are you willing to decrease the amount your house is heated or cooled, heated if you have electrical heating, on some of these stressful days for the electricity grid? Let’s supercharge the amount that we can get from. These types of resources called demand response and energy efficiency improvements. Let’s weatherize more homes. Let’s put more efficient windows in. Let’s go away from the super inefficient electrical resistance heating, which is an issue in Texas, and put in way more efficient air source heat pump heating sources. So these are also pieces of the puzzle that are lower cost resources that utilities don’t earn as much money on, but they need to invest in to help solve this challenge of a greater clean energy, renewable energy, dominant electricity grid.
Amy I mean, yeah, an energy utility is going to make way more money building a gas power plant than they are saying, hey, why don’t you save energy? I mean I don’t know how they make any money is asking people to save energy. And I think that is kind of an issue.
Ciaran Yes, I mean, there’s some perverse incentives there. And relating to my comment earlier, I think data centers are forcing these decisions by utilities. I mean they are going to make a lot of money building gas to serve data centers, but maybe they can’t build as much as they would want to. So let’s increase more energy efficiency demand response. I I hope that we can. Uh encourage incentivize force uh utilities to do this more without a data center and a gas power plant hovering over our heads um but that’s that’s something that we at Claim Wisconsin will just continue to to advocate for in uh all decisions that come in front of our state regulators.
Amy Well, Ciaran, thank you so much for talking with me about this. And I know we’re all going to be racing for those next energy bills, but at least we’ll kind of have a sense about why it’s happening. So thank you.
Ciaran You’re welcome and stay warm.
Amy And thank you for listening to The Defender. 2026 is gonna be a big year for wind and solar projects in Wisconsin. To find out when projects are proposed and how you can support them, join our action network. Just log on to cleanwisconsin.org/action. I’m Amy Barrilleaux, talk to you later.
