Texas is an electrical (among other things) mess. The state features an independent grid operator that is purposefully, and stupidly, unconnected to the rest of the U.S. It has inadequate and unreliable generation, with little flexibility. It has retail rate regulators subservient to the utilities it regulates. Its ideology is autarky, which never works.
Texas also has a citizenship close to revolt, as much of the state is recovering from a disastrous February cold snap, hardly unknown in the Lone Star State, that caused widespread power outages, costing lives and billions of dollars in losses. Many residents are still recovering, with little help from their state government.
Richard Justice, a veteran sports reporter and Texas native who lives in Houston, said recently that the state set up the Electric Reliability Council of Texas because the state leaders believe they are smarter than anybody else. While that’s not quite historically correct – Texas set up ERCOT many years ago because the state’s investor-owned utilities wanted to evade federal regulation – it is also intellectually correct. And they were wrong.
In March, the National Regulatory Research Institute, an arm of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, issued a devastating analysis of the Texas February failures. It found cascading errors up and down the Texas electric system.
On Tuesday (April 13), with the February debacle still fresh, ERCOT put out an announcement telling customers that they should cut back on electric use in order to avoid rolling blackouts, aka “load shedding.” The grid manager said about a quarter if the state’s generating capacity was offline as generating companies were getting ready for the summer load, and demand was getting close to overtaking capacity. Texas regularly suffers from Winter and Summer shortages, and now can add Spring.
In a statement following its call for conservation, ERCOT vice president Woody Rickerson said in a response to an inquiry from Newsweek, “Due to a combination of high generation outages typical in April and higher than forecasted demand from a stalled cold front over Texas, ERCOT may enter into emergency conditions this afternoon.”
Luckily, Texas on Tuesday dodged the rolling blackout bullet. But will they in the future?
Unlikely, based on the past, according to recent Congressional testimony from the North American Electric Reliability Council, charged with supervising the national grid’s ability to withstand shocks.
NERC CEO James Robb told the House Energy and Commerce Committee March 24, that his organization has been warning about reliability problems in ERCOT since 2012. He testified, “Concern for ERCOT’s reserve margins has been a standing concern in NERC’s assessments. In the most recent 2020/2021 Winter Reliability Assessment, NERC warns of the potential for extreme generation resource outages in ERCOT due to severe weather in winter and summer, and the potential need for grid operators to employ operating mitigations or energy emergency alerts to meet peak demand.”
On April 6, a week before the latest Texas ungainly electrical two-step, ERCOT issued a report providing its preliminary assessment of the February mess. The report highlighted the conventional reasons offered for the blackouts and deratings that cause such turmoil: existing outages, fuel supply problems (particularly natural gas), generating plants not prepared for cold weather, normal equipment failures, lost transmission, and frequency fluctuations that tripped out generation (which appear to be a function of all of the above).
Travis Kavulla, vice president for regulatory affairs at NRG, an independent electricity generating company and a former Montana utility regulator, was critical of the ERCOT preliminary report. In a series of tweets, he concluded, “In short, a casual observer looking at the ERCOT report may come away thinking all other causes of outages – gas supply, frequency, and non-weather equipment issues – weren’t big deals. That’s not the right way of looking at this.
“The analysis should be: What causes of outages, if corrected, would have led to more energy being able to supply the system? The ERCOT report falls short on that measure.”
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com)