Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto via AP
ERCOT continues to warn Texans about potential power outages as temperatures in the state soar higher than predicted.
A state that boasts abundant energy is once again asking residents to curb electricity use.
On Monday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) asked businesses and households to ration energy, raising concern about potential rolling blackouts. The weekend saw Texas’s second-hottest July day since 1950, with the temperature in Somerville reaching 113 degrees.
Texas’s grid was already under scrutiny after a winter storm last year left millions without power, killing 200 people and triggering exorbitant electricity bills. The state withstood peak demand on Monday, with help from industrial Bitcoin miners who powered down their energy-intensive operations, saving over 1 percent of grid capacity, Bloomberg reported. But scorching days stretch ahead.
Calls to conserve electricity are being heard worldwide, as energy analysts caution that entire regions could face a summer of blackouts driven by high gas prices, production shortages, and fragile supplies. But restrictions are especially notable in America’s top energy-producing state, where scarcity owes as much to poor grid design and wasteful usage as it does to shortfalls in supply.
Three immediate factors are straining Texas’s grid: record-breaking demand, low wind, and outages in thermal energy, largely made up of natural gas.
ERCOT had planned for scenarios in which wind, which always drops in the summer, falls off even more dramatically. Those scenarios count on gas and coal plants to fill the gap. But thermal energy did not deliver as expected. According to calculations based on ERCOT’s press release, some 12 gigawatts of thermal—more than the amount of energy New York City uses on a peak summer day—was offline.
Grid design choices are also squeezing supply. Just as Texas failed to weatherize power systems to prepare for a winter freeze, it has lagged on making homes energy-efficient with measures like insulation, which keeps air conditioning from leaking. And Texas’s free-market electricity grid, deregulated in the 1990s under pressure from natural gas trader Enron, was designed to be ultra-efficient, with minimal cushioning during times of crisis.
THE TEXAS GRID is an island. While most states are hooked into regional power systems, the ERCOT grid only operates in-state, and is not subject to federal oversight. Also unlike other states, which closely monitor private utilities as regulated monopolies, ERCOT gives the market free rein.
“The Texas electricity market is set up to lead to periods like this, which are intended to signal that more energy should be built out,” said Emily Beagle, an energy researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. That price signaling has been effective: Developers aggressively built out wind and solar farms as they became cheaper alternatives to natural gas, even near the sprawling oil fields of the Permian Basin.
Now, those renewables are keeping energy bills modest through peak demand, while natural gas prices soar. But solar and wind pose different oversight challenges: They are intermittent, meaning they can’t be fired up at will, unlike dispatchable energy sources such as gas. Texas has installed more battery power than most other states, but that storage method still only covers a fraction of demand.
Texas has lagged on making homes energy-efficient with measures like insulation, which keeps air conditioning from leaking.
Several energy experts said that a resilient grid will require more buildout of solar and wind, transmission lines, and on-demand power sources. Currently, Texas’s dispatchable power is drawn primarily from natural gas power plants. But clean sources also exist, such as nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal, another resource in which Texas is abundant. And standing those up alongside intermittent energy will require planning.
“When all of your power is dispatchable, you don’t really need somebody to look at the composition of your grid. It doesn’t matter if it’s all coal, or all natural gas, or all nuclear, or some mix. But when you get to a grid that has a lot of renewables on it, you have to have somebody managing the composition,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric and climate science at Texas A&M University.
While gas is dispatchable, that doesn’t make it totally reliable. Based on numbers provided in the press release, Dessler estimated that ERCOT’s projected shortfall in thermal energy on Monday was around 12 gigawatts. Yet it only listed high demand and low wind as sources of strain—a choice Dessler sees as motivated. By focusing on wind, Dessler told the Prospect, “They were setting up an excuse, a fall guy.”
Bottlenecks to transmission are also hampering the distribution of renewables, said Hugh Daigle, an earth scientist at UT Austin’s Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. The growth of renewable energy has outstripped the carrying capacity of power lines, leading ERCOT to limit the amount of power wind and solar farms can sell onto the grid, even when demand is high.
“We simply don’t have enough power lines,” Daigle told the Prospect. He estimated that transmission constraints account for around 30 percent of the current tightness in energy supply.
The backbone of Texas’s renewables boom is a system of transmission lines built by Gov. Rick Perry in 2005, when renewables were less politicized. Former president George W. Bush, Perry’s predecessor as governor, put out campaign materials glamorizing wind energy. But as the system for slinging energy from windy West Texas to the more populous cities in the east becomes congested, it is also becoming more politically controversial.
In the coming months, a system designed to run without slack could be stretched to the breaking point. “This is really a failure of the ERCOT grid. It’s a failure of the system,” Dessler said. “I wouldn’t blame any individual power source. I’m not blaming the fossil fuels, either. The ERCOT grid is just not very robust. We don’t have any spare capacity.”
