Abbott orders changes for grid
Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday ordered the Public Utility Commission to make substantial changes to “ensure the reliability of the Texas power grid” but that prioritize the same sources that caused the bulk of the failures during power crises this year, energy experts say.
Abbott asked the agency to create more incentives for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid manager, to develop and maintain power sources such as natural gas and coal.
He also wants renewable energy generators to pay additional costs for periods when they don’t provide power to the grid, establish a maintenance schedule for non-renewable power sources to prevent mechanical failures, and order ERCOT to speed development of some transmission projects.
“The objective of these directives is to ensure that all Texans have access to reliable, safe, and affordable power,” Abbott wrote in a letter mandating the changes.
The orders could effectively impose rules considered — but ulti
mately abandoned — by the Texas Legislature this year as lawmakers debated how to shore up the state’s troubled electrical grid. Chief among them is assessing additional fees for wind and solar power generators while providing tax incentives and perhaps subsidies to fossil-fuel and nuclear power producers.
Daniel Cohan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, said that while there are challenges with having more renewable sources on the grid, fossil-fuel sources have failed more often than anticipated. The so-called thermal sources are suffering two to three times more outages than ERCOT estimated this year, he said.
“What we need for reliable electricity isn’t picking winners and losers, but is figuring out better ways for all of these power sources to work together as a better functioning team,” Cohan said.
The directives come about three weeks after ERCOT warned Texans to limit their use of electricity or risk rolling blackouts. On June 14, the grid operator said that about 15 percent of the system’s generating capacity went offline unexpectedly, forcing the agency to dip into reserve sources and to issue a conservation notice that lasted for five days. At the same time, demand soared to a record high, breaking a 3-year-old mark.
No quick fix
The changes Abbott ordered will be functionally impossible for the PUC to institute before demand grows higher in August and again in winter, said Alison Silverstein, an Austin-based energy consultant who worked for the PUC from 1995 to 2001 and with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2001 to 2004.
The PUC already has to work within statutes and regulations that often limit how quickly they can do things, Silverstein said. Studying the issues laid out in Abbott’s letter, and creating potential fixes, could take months, she said.
“The PUC can’t just change those on a whim,” Silverstein said. “They’re probably asking themselves ‘How do we address the substance of these obligations; what is it that can and should be done; and what is the process through which the PUC is able to do these in a way that is consistent with their regulatory processes?”
Even if Abbott or the PUC could wave a magic wand to make the changes within a matter of days, Silverstein and Cohan said they do not believe the grid would be much more reliable.
The letter doesn’t address record-setting demand, which continues to rise as more people move to the state. Creating a program to better insulate homes, creating better energy efficient building standards and helping to install better airconditioning and heating units, could “probably drop half of the electricity usage at peak,” Silverstein said.
Furthermore, about 80 percent of the power that went offline during the February and June power crises came from sources like natural gas and coal, ERCOT said at the time.
Laws already passed
Kay Mccall, executive director of the Renewable Energy Alliance of Houston, said trying to address supply issues by financially penalizing renewables, which accounted for more than 35 percent of the state’s generating capacity in March, is short-sighted.
“You want to solve the problem of not having enough megawatts by chasing some megawatts off the grid?” Mccall said. “I don’t quite get that.”
Abbott, however, said power generators are expected to produce enough power to meet the needs of Texans, and they should shoulder the cost when they don’t. Not doing so, he wrote, “creates an uneven playing field between nonrenewable and renewable energy generators and creates uncertainty of available generation in ERCOT.”
“To maintain sufficient power generation — especially during times of high demand — we must ensure that all power generators can provide a minimum amount of power at any given time,” the governor wrote.
The Legislature has already passed several laws concerning ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission this year, including orders for more timely communication, requiring power generators to better withstand extreme weather and labeling power generators as “critical” infrastructure to keep them from having their power shut off during rolling blackouts.
“Everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas,” Abbott said when he signed the bills into law June 8.
Those changes, however, didn’t address some issues experts said would be needed to prevent future issues with the grid. Their recommendations included paying generators for long-term stability projects, investing in utility-scale batteries, requiring more emergency drills and updating grid equipment so operators can better manage power outages, among other things.