Industry experts say the state’s power grid has improved since the 2021 winter storm that rocked Texas.
On October 25, industry experts gathered at the University of Texas Arlington for GridNEXT DFW, a forum to discuss the future of the state’s energy solutions.
Woody Rickerson, Chief Operating Officer for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), says the state has seen a proliferation of energy sources, like solar and wind.
“I think there are more wind and more solar units than we’ve ever seen before, so there’s more access to that type of energy, but we also have to deal with the variability that comes with those,” Rickerson said, per KERA News.
While Texas is famous for its oil industry, petroleum is far from the only source of energy coming out of the state. A recently published report by the Environment Texas Research & Policy Center ranked Texas No. 1 for wind generation and No. 2 for solar power generation and battery storage capacity in the country.
But as Rickerson noted, solar and wind can both be “variable.” After all, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.
“The grid is more reliable in the sense that ERCOT and power plant operators have improved their operations to enable greater uptime and fewer failures during extreme weather events,” said Brent Bennett, Ph.D., with the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Life:Powered initiative. “However, the ERCOT system has roughly the same amount of dispatachable capacity as it did prior to the 2021 winter storm, and less than it did in 2017, despite demand growing nearly 15% since 2017.”
That means the grid’s ability to tolerate variability is lower now.
“As long as the ERCOT grid relies solely on variable wind and solar to meet demand growth, the grid will need to utilize more expensive batteries and quick-start gas to fill in the gaps, driving up costs and increasing the vulnerability to outages,” Bennett told The Dallas Express.
Earlier this month, DX reported that Google plans to leverage solar energy generated in Texas to support data centers in Ellis County and cloud computing in the Dallas Region. The tech giant will harness power from three solar farms that can produce 875 megawatts.
“I think the grid that you see in five years is going to be very different than the one we have today… Even though we’ve seen a lot of changes in recent years, that change is going to continue,” said ERCOT’s Rickerson.
The Lone Star State faces some unique challenges regarding energy generation. Texas is vulnerable to various threats from Mother Nature, including wildfires, hurricanes, and tornadoes. As a result, Ken Donohoo, a consultant at Owl Electric Reliability, states that energy providers need to prepare for extreme weather events.
“We’re getting hail storms damaging solar farms. We’ve got tornadoes damaging solar farms. It’s all those different things, and that’s what we’ve got to think about in our daily lives,” says Donohoo.