It’s February 1st as this is being written. The Metroplex is under a Winter Storm Warning with temperatures below freezing. Almost everything is covered in ice. The streets are almost empty. There are reports of some power outages which is, of course, unfortunate for those families and businesses that are directly affected by their loss of power. The power losses, though, are not due to a failure to produce electricity, but primarily due to downed transmission lines or equipment failure due to ice build-up.
The power outages in 2021 that resulted in so much misery for many Texans, are not the problem this year. Texas’ Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has stabilized, for the most part, the supply of electricity to the area of Texas that it covers. (A map showing the Texas Grid can be found here. only the far western and eastern portions of Texas are not on Texas’ Grid).
ERCOT’s dashboard also shows the source of each type of energy that is fueling the Grid in real time. A chart showing the percentage of each source of energy that is producing electricity for the Texas Grid is shown here.
As this is being written, the fuel sources are as follows:
Other < 0.05%*
Hydro < 0.05%*
Power Storage < 0.05%*
Solar = 0.9%
Wind = 3.2%
Nuclear = 8.3%
Coal and Lignite = 19%
Natural Gas = 68.6%
*author’s interpretation of ERCOT’s data
If one watches the ERCOT dashboard throughout the day, these percentages will likely change with Solar increasing as more sunlight strikes the solar farms out in West Texas.
The point though of this article should be obvious by now. Almost 70% of the electricity that helped get Texans through the freezing night last night, came from Natural Gas. Add in Nuclear, Coal and Lignite and is just below 96%.
We are currently dependent on these main fuel sources to defend ourselves against Mother Nature’s winter onslaught against us. Thank goodness our predecessors that set up our power-grid had the foresight to enable Texans to get through such natural hardships. Is this Grid perfect? No, of course not. But think about how life would be if the Grid did not exist at all?
What if it did exist, but Natural Gas, Nuclear, Coal and Lignite were banned from use as a fuel? This is what some would want to happen.
There is no question that, in general, “renewable anything” is better than using up resources never to have them available in the future. The easiest example of renewable resources is wood. Trees can be grown anew and replace those that have been harvested. Energy is different in that it is used up and cannot be grown (except for Fusion, but we’ll need to wait for that more permanent solution).
Any reasonable person understands that renewable Wind and Solar are desirable sources of fuel, but their ability to produce reliable energy is inconsistent. If you study the ERCOT charts for Wind and Solar (found here) as fuel supplying energy to the Grid, you will notice that they generally operate inversely, i.e. when Wind is the primary source, Solar tends to be less so, when Solar is primary, Wind is less so. These are general statements and the charts will show you the actual usage (solid lines) and well as the predicted use (dotted lines). The one downside that is starting to rear its head in the use of these renewables is that the mechanisms that are used to capture the fuel source (solar panels and wind turbines) are not so renewable. Let us discuss Solar for a moment.
Currently, the life span of Solar Panels is in the 20-30 year range. Reports are already appearing in California of troubles caused by disposing of depleted panels (which can contain Hazardous Materials (HM)). Those people who have bought shares of Solar farms could face financial challenges down the road. A Solar farm that covers, say, one square mile, could easily house more than a million panels. When they wear out, the owners will have a few choices, especially if they have contracted with energy companies to provide electricity to the energy company’s grid.
Option 1: Replace all of the panels. The cost equivalent to or higher than the original cost simply due to inflation and higher labor costs. But more challenging is the disposal of all the depleted panels, especially if they were made with HM. This cost could exceed to cost of new panels. It is possible that these owners of the HM will be legally tied to their disposal of the HM in perpetuity.
Option 2: Replace no panels. The cost is of course zero, unless there is a penalty clause in the contract with the energy company receiving the generated power, this could get costly. Of course, the farm going off the grid only adds to the long-range problem as less electricity is now being produced. Again, should the panels be made of HM, then the owners have a site that is potentially the source of HM leakage into the surrounding land, opening up themselves to pollution lawsuits by either or both the EPA and their neighbors.
Option 3: Shut down the farm and dispose of all existing panels. This is a partial combination of the first two options where the farm is off-grid and the existing panels are disposed of. At least the panels are removed from polluting the area, should they contain HM. Without returning the farm to production, this is likely the most expensive option as there is no recovery of the cost since now no further electricity is produced.
While this is a simple walkthrough of future possibilities, the main point is that for the foreseeable future, we are reliant upon Natural Gas, Nuclear, Coal, and Lignite, for our power source here in Texas. Please also be aware TEXAS has the largest installed infrastructure capacity of Wind (≈25,000 MW, ≈3x’s more than the next state, Iowa) and 2nd most Solar (≈16,000 MW, 1st CA, 38MW) in the United States and still cannot meet even all of Texas’ needs.
Renewables are a positive thing. What is needed is a reasonable plan to get there. Cutting off Natural Gas, Nuclear, Coal and Lignite overnight is not the answer. Planning in the short term that they provide reliable energy for Texans, to be slowly replaced by just as reliable alternative sources, is what reasonable people can accept. Hopefully soon (in our lifetime?), with the recent successful fusion experiment which produced more energy than was input, we will cross over into a new period in human history when energy is no longer an issue. Until then, stay warm.
Louis Darrouzet
Chief Executive Officer
Metroplex Civic & Business Association