With hot temperatures expected in the Lone Star State this summer, a report published by the entities responsible for managing the Texas power grid has raised concerns about maintaining a sufficient electricity supply to meet increased demand.
ERCOT released its Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy (SARA) report on May 3, showing that trouble could be ahead for Texas residents if (or rather when) extreme summer conditions strike.
The stability of the power grid is not in question, which infamously failed when a big snowstorm struck the state two years ago.
With outages causing over 200 deaths and billions in property damage, the fallout of this event continues to be the subject of several active lawsuits, as The Dallas Express reported.
Instead, this summer, there may be a shortage of dispatchable energy.
“Data shows for the first time that the peak demand for electricity this summer will exceed the amount we can generate from on-demand, dispatchable power,” explained Public Utility Commission (PUC) Chair Peter Lake, according to The Texas Tribune. “So we will be relying on renewables to keep the lights on.”
But wind and solar power can be unpredictable.
In the event of extremely hot weather coupled with low wind conditions, there might not be enough dispatchable energy available to meet increased consumer demand, and outages might occur after sunset.
To address this challenge, both ERCOT and the PUC have called for more investment and incentives to build more dispatchable power generators so that the state can have a reliable supply to serve the growing demand for electricity.
Texas leads the nation in wind power and has a rapidly growing solar capacity, and the state balances its renewable energy mix with dispatchable power to ensure grid stability and resilience.
The question of how Texas will meet its energy requirements lies at the heart of a recent legislative package passed by Texas senators that aims to reform the state’s electric grid.
The measures are meant to shore up power reserve generation and make the grid more reliable.
The proposed measures include building new natural gas plants and keeping older ones online through an incentivizing scheme still being evaluated by lawmakers, according to The Texas Tribune.
But advocates of renewable energy generation, like Vice President of the Advanced Power Alliance Judd Messer, claim that renewables are essential — and that their reliability is primarily being questioned for political reasons.
“The reality is that the grid will require all its resources to keep the lights on this summer,” Messer said, according to The Texas Tribune.
The facts are, as ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas explained, that “models estimate that this summer’s peak could be about 6000 megawatts greater than last summer’s,” according to Fox 4.
Meanwhile, ERCOT is “only expecting a nominal increase of about 850 megawatts of thermal capacity since last summer,” Vegas said, according to Fox 4.
At the same time, Dr. Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Fox 4 that Texas residents shouldn’t be too worried about ERCOT’s report.
“Pretty much everything has to go wrong for the lights to go out. And it’s a pretty small chance that that would happen. And if it does, I wouldn’t expect it to last very long,” Rhodes explained.
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