Blackout still threatening this winter
A guarantee that a customer will be satisfied with a service or product is often accompanied with the reassurance that if there isn’t satisfaction, a refund will be issued.
Gov. Greg Abbott has guaranteed the lights throughout Texas will stay on this winter and there won’t be a repeat of last February’s freeze and power outage, which led to more than 200 deaths and up to $130 billion in financial losses.
Abbott told Fox 7 Austin,“i can guarantee the lights will stay on.”
And later, he cited changes at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT:
“Most importantly is the approach that ERCOT has taken this year, unlike last year. Last year, they were reactive, and they waited until a crisis mode before they summoned more power, more energy. Now the way ERCOT works is, they work days in advance to begin summoning that power to make sure they will have enough power to keep the lights on.”
We hope he is right, but hope is not enough.
The governor has a penchant for making declarations of unrealistic goals. Consider how he vowed in September, “Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas by aggressively going out and arresting them and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets.”
Many experts have said state lawmakers failed to produce the regulatory reform needed to ensure natural gas supply should we be hit with another deep freeze.
As Doug Lewin, an Austin-based energy consultant, told the Texas Tribune, the state has done “next to nothing” in terms of weatherizing the natural gas supply.
If Texans are forced to endure anything like the death, damage and discomfort of Winter Storm Uri — several of our Editorial Board members were without power for days — there will be no refunds or compensatory damages. More likely, there will be an increase in their energy bills, adding insult to injury.
An ERCOT analysis offers a strangely cheery, optimistic, whistling-because-there’s-no-dark (yet) assessment of the sustainability of the power grid this winter.
The report, “Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy for the ERCOT Region Winter 2021/2022,” boasts of its “new aggressive” approach to managing the energy grid including significant operational improvements.
But that’s followed by this graph (emphasis added), “Assuming that the ERCOT Region experiences typical winter grid conditions, ERCOT anticipates that there will be sufficient installed generating capacity available to serve the system-wide forecasted peak demand for the upcoming winter season, December 2021 — February 2022. The forecasted peak demand is 62,001 MW and is based on the average weather conditions at the time of the winter peak demand. As part of our aggressive grid management planning, we have also included additional low-probability, high-impact scenarios.”
Winter Storm Uri wasn’t typical.
Therein lies the potential problem. Of five extreme scenarios imagined by ERCOT, four of them would tax the grid beyond capacity and lead to outages across the state.
The possibilities of these scenarios happening are remote, but tell that to someone who froze in the dark during Uri.
As it was after 1989, 2011, and now 2021, the autopsies of these storms always reveals that the damage could have been avoided with better preparation and protected power plants.
In his TV interview, Abbott talked about the dozen bills he signed to strengthen the grid, but a September report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, or NERC, echoes consumer groups and experts in the field in saying that not enough has been done.
The Legislature’s passage of a bill requiring natural gas companies to weatherize is toothless because it allows companies to opt out and there’s a lack of data to accurately gauge which and how many companies have weatherized their plants.
We hope Abbott is right, but should the lights and heat go out, again, this winter, the warmth felt by Texans will come from simmering anger.