Experts: Sticking with grid could hurt Texas
Since the February power outages, Texas legislators have been busy weighing a host of improvements for the state’s grid, from weatherizing equipment to shaking up oversight to partnering with the billionaire investor Warren Buffett on new emergency-use power plants.
But hardly any of them have focused on what some believe could be a more widespread fix: plugging into other U.S. power supplies.
While Texas has long opposed opening its grid to avoid federal oversight, and ostensibly to keep prices low, energy experts say the calculus is not what it once was and that the benefits of connecting to the outside world are at least worth examining, especially as renewable energy is poised for a major expansion under the Biden administration.
Not only is the state missing out on a potential lifeline in future blackouts, they warn, it also risks passing up billions of dollars in new investments for clean, marketable electricity.
“We export every form of energy you could imagine except electrons,” Michael Webber, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters recently. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “Let’s at least study the option.”
Texas is the only contiguous state with its own grid, a decision prompted by the creation in 1935 of a federal commission to oversee interstate power transactions. Today, the state has just a handful of transmission lines linking to neighboring power supplies.
Though a more integrated grid would probably not have prevented the outages in February— surrounding states were also struggling to meet demand — it could have helped shorten them substantially, according to Dan Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. The blackouts left 4.5 million Texans without power and water for days and contributed to at least 197 deaths.
Most importantly, Cohan said, having outside power supplies would strengthen the grid’s reliability during the state’s most frequent natural disasters.
“The vast majority of our crises are more often a summer drought, or a summer hurricane, or a summer flood that hits Texas more strongly than other states, where we would have plenty of power that we could have been importing in,” he said.
Some question, though, whether joining other grids would be worth the cost, especially because building new transmission lines is expensive and obtaining permits can take years. Without a robust build-out, the state would be giving up its autonomy without gaining substantial backup capacity.
Skeptics also point out that the Legislature, which is heavily influenced by the oil and gas sector, is best served going after more immediate, attainable goals. For renewable advocates, that means expanding resources along the Gulf Coast, where weather patterns vary from windy areas in West Texas and can add more in-state reliability.
For some conservatives, it means cutting back on intermittent wind and solar power and encouraging a return of coal and other fossil fuel generation.
“I don’t see that interconnecting to other (regional power entities) makes the resources more reliable or not,” said Michelle Richmond, a lobbyist for the state’s largest power companies. “From our perspective, the ERCOT system has worked well,” she added, referring to the grid’s manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
‘Completely changed’
The conversation comes as research has called for a more fully integrated national grid, especially as wind and solar emerge as dominant players. Because both are weather dependent, having regional entities that can more easily share power when electricity is abundant will be increasingly important, both in terms of reliability and incentivizing new clean energy projects.
But Texas has been mostly overlooked in the analyses, given its independence, and the last major study from the Legislature on interconnection appears to have been in 1999, before the market was deregulated and the renewable sector had taken off. That work, which was inconclusive, examined only a narrow range of options.
“It’s completely changed,” Varun Rai, director of the Energy Institute at UT-Austin, said of the economics underlying the grid. He added that the state’s population has also exploded in the past 20 years. “Given the really big scale of changes that are happening across the system, it’s really time to take a deep, serious look at this,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with its vision to invest billions of dollars in renewable energy over the coming years, including new transmission lines under its infrastructure proposal now before Congress. Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, said those projects could take a decade to complete and that there is wide interest in getting them off the ground as soon as possible.
“If that does kind of shake out, and there is really this massive transmission build-out, I think the question is, is Texas going to be part of this or not,” he said.
In the past, Texas has tapped into other grids without triggering federal oversight by using a loophole in the law that allows for unregulated transmission lines if they send electricity in one direction only, rather than back and forth. Those efforts have been limited, however, and the biggest recent project in development, called Tres Amigas, was scaled back in 2017.
Julie Cohn, an energy historian with Rice University and the University of Houston, said the state could add more “direct current” lines but that federal regulators may try to intervene if there were so many that Texas was essentially working in tandem with another grid.
“If it’s integrated into the regular everyday operations, I think it would be really hard to make the case that it was no longer connecting Texas to the rest of the country,” she said.
Windfall possible
Either way, if the state did open up, it would be renewables that stand to benefit most. That could translate to a windfall for state and local governments.
“If we hook up to the other grids, 99.9 percent of the time we can export electrons and we would make a lot of money, because Californians would pay a premium for the energy we can sell, which is wind and solar,” said Webber, the UT professor. “It would be a huge moneymaker for us.”
Rice’s Cohan said gasand coal-fired power plants would likely take a hit because they would no longer be the only options during emergency periods, when prices rise on the power they produce.
“Once you alleviate those bottlenecks, then you will have a handful of the dirty, older power plants that won’t make as much money,” he said.