On Monday, Texans were asked to reduce their electricity usage during a heat wave this week, so that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) could ensure they had enough juice to keep the A/C’s on across the state through the (climate-changed) 90+ degree weather.
Given that last time extreme weather caused a massively lethal blackout in Texas, fossil fuel fans prematurely blamed renewables, it’s likely they’ll do it again this week. Nevermind that it was false when they said it about Texas, and false when they said it about California last year, too.
Edward Klump and Mike Lee of E&E contacted ERCOT, and spoke with its senior director of system planning Warren Lasher. He told them that while variability in renewable sources of power is “somewhat large,” it’s also “well-known,” so they can plan for it.
But what’s unexpected “is the forced outages in the thermal [gas and coal] fleet.” It’s not the predictable swings of wind and solar power that’s causing issues, but the outages from nuclear and fossil fuel plants that seem to have caught them off guard—8,000 of the 11,000 MW of power generation that was down on Monday was thermal plants. (Wind, by contrast, was only down 1,500 MW, and is expected to pick up over the course of the week.)
What is to blame? Lasher said they expect power plants “would be able to make their plants available under conditions such as this,” and the current failures are “not consistent with fleet performance over the past few summers.”
Beyond the regular failures of fossil fuel infrastructure, Texas power plant operators may have learned an unfortunate lesson this year, when energy companies raked in millions and billions of dollars by nailing customers with five-figure energy bills — bills for which the state PUC lifted shutoff protections last week.
Because the Texas grid is independent of a larger regional one, and is largely deregulated, it wouldn’t be difficult for unscrupulous companies to manipulate prices. Similar to how Enron did in California, if these companies shut off a power plant and declare it offline, prices will rise. Then, they can “fix” the plant to bring it back online and then sell their power at a much higher rate, explained energy economist Ed Hirs. “We teach this in school,” the University of Houston professor told E&E.
Which just leaves the question of whether these thermal plants, whose supporters promote them over climate-friendly alternatives in part based on their supposed reliability, are going offline because they’re not actually reliable, or because their operators are deliberately exploiting Texas’s deregulated grid. Either way, it’s not a great look.
ERCOT certainly wants to know, though, as Lasher told E&E they “will be doing a thorough investigation to understand what the issues are and to assess what the implications are for the grid.”
Unfortunately, deniers aren’t exactly known for waiting around for the facts to come in…