Summer of 2023 will test grid plans
It’s 100 degrees outside. Do you know where your electricity is coming from? After a delightful spring filled with a fiery debate over the grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, summer is here to test our best-laid plans. What is likely to be Texas’ hottest summer will provide remarkable lessons about our energy future.
An El Niño weather pattern formed last week, which means an extra hot summer for Texas. The ERCOT grid is already flirting with record electricity demand, and it’s only June.
ERCOT generators are tackling the first week of century-topping temperatures with confidence. Peak demand is exceeding the amount that crashed the grid in February 2021, which helped lead to the deaths of hundreds of people and cut power to millions of Texans on the coldest nights in memory.
The forecast as of Tuesday predicted ERCOT will set a record at 4 p.m. on Friday with 82,224 megawatts of demand. On Monday, it could reach 82,771 megawatts. The previous record, set last July, was 80,038 megawatts.
New solar, wind and battery facilities make up most of the new generation added in the past year, with natural gas providing about half the total supply and acting as backup power.
ERCOT says Texans shouldn’t worry. It will have more than 87,000 megawatts available Friday if everything goes as planned, which it usually does. But every once in a while ...
Our elected representatives are worried about those once-in-a-whiles because polling shows electricity is top of mind for Texans after the 2021 blackouts. Gov. Greg Abbott promised in 2021 that the grid was fixed, but near misses last summer and December proved that wasn’t true.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, his leadership team and the natural gas industry tried to convince Texans only fossil fuels can provide reliability. While the data shows natural gas generation failed us in 2021, Republican lawmakers generally fell in behind their largest campaign donors.
The 2023 legislative session was a knock-down, drag-out fight between the people selling electricity and the commercial and industrial users buying power. Natural gas generators got some preferential treatment, but those plans will take two years to implement. Consumers got a win, too, limiting the flawed Performance Credit Mechanism to only $1 billion a year.
In the meantime, the grid is operating with only one significant improvement since 2021. A new backup program called the ERCOT Contingency Reserve Service is a fifth and vital arrow in ERCOT’s quiver in case of an emergency.
Relying on load forecasts, ERCOT determines the likelihood of an emergency and how much power the grid would need to address it. Generators compete to meet that hypothetical need in an auction the day before. ERCOT pays the lowest bidder and pays the power plants to stand by.
Most grids call such a system a capacity market because the grid is paying for excess capacity, not energy. But because Texas Republicans don’t want to acknowledge that their socalled energy-only market failed, ERCOT must call it a contingency service.
Most engineers I’ve interviewed say a capacity market is the smartest way to guarantee reliability without gouging customers. The nation’s largest electric grid, PJM, invites generators to bid their backup power a year in advance. Longterm contracts allow generators to make investment decisions to build new power plants.
Texas could and should do the same thing. Every company that owns a power plant in Texas says it needs long-term certainty before it can build new power plants of any kind.
A capacity market would solve the problem.
Another surefire and affordable way to solve ERCOT’s reliability problem was recently highlighted in a great interactive story in the New York Times: Integrate ERCOT’s electric grid with the rest of the country and share power.
Georgia has a big new nuclear power plant, while Texas has a lot of sun and wind. Demand in Texas and Georgia peaks at different times, so why not trade? We could do the same with California when our night winds generate more electricity than Texas can use.
Lastly, energy efficiency aficionados and small-scale generators claim they can take the load off when the grid is overloaded. ERCOT is signing up big power users to voluntarily shut down when ERCOT peaks out, something mindful residents can also do.
The most interesting question is whether we will need new natural gas plants or meet our needs in other ways.
Meteorologists say 2023 could be the hottest. We’re improving reliability, but this summer may reveal the best way forward.
Chris Tomlinson, named 2021 columnist of the year by the Texas Managing Editors, writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at HoustonChronicle.com/ TomlinsonNewsletter or Expressnews.com/TomlinsonNews letter.twitter.com/cltomlinson ctomlinson@hearstcorp.com