You know how the much of the Texas interconnect grid went black back in 2021 due to over-reliance on trendy renewable energy rather than natural gas and nuclear baseload?
Well guess what?
Public Utility Commission (PUC) Chairman Peter Lake and Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) CEO Pablo Vegas sent a clear message to the Texas Legislature on Wednesday: tweak the electricity market so that natural gas generation can be supplemented, or continue to face problems in the summer heat.
I just have to pause here to note that “Pablo Vegas” sounds like an Anthony Weiner pseudonym.
“Operationally, the ERCOT grid is ready for this summer,” Lake said, unveiling the 2023 Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy (SARA) report. “The reliability reforms that were put in place have been tested and continue to work. We’ve made the grid we’ve got as strong as possible using every tool available.”
The SARA report, as Lake stated, is an estimate of electricity demand and supply for certain scenarios based on past data, not a forecast of what is to come this summer.
It estimates peak demand to reach 82,739 megawatts (MW); for comparison, 1 MW can power about 200 homes during the peak demand hours of the late summer afternoon through evening. To cope with that demand, the state expects to have 97,000 MW of capacity available — two-thirds of which is thermal generation, combined with 13 percent from solar and 11 percent from wind.
However, Lake tinged the grid’s readiness with an omen.
“Data shows for the first time that peak demand this summer will exceed the amount we can generate from on-demand dispatchable power,” Lake warned. “There is no longer enough dispatchable generation to meet the demand of the ERCOT system. So, we will be relying on renewables to keep the lights on.”
The State of Texas is adding about 300,000 people per year, which means a larger and larger demand for electricity on the state’s largest power grid.
“In this new reality, our risk goes up as the sun goes down,” Lake added.
Vegas likened the situation to a car: the metaphorical vehicle — the physical grid itself — is up to par on maintenance, but it lacks the necessary fuel — the electricity supply — to power its full trip ahead.
Lake said that ERCOT’s dispatchable supply fleet only grew 1.5 percent from 2008 to 2022. During that time, its renewable footprint grew substantially with now more than 30,000 MW of wind power installed and more than 10,000 MW of solar.
The influx of renewables is driven primarily by the Production Tax Credit — a federal subsidy that pays renewable generators 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour produced — which has given wind and now solar an advantage over thermal generation sources. ERCOT has 31,000 MW of solar generation in the queue along with 5,000 MW of wind.
In contrast, only 800 MW of dispatchable power has been added in the last year, according to Lake.
So thanks to renewables, blackouts may be in the future of Texans this summer.
But don’t worry! The federal government has a solution: making sure no one has reliable power.
The Biden administration is announcing a climate rule that would require most fossil fuel power plants to slash their greenhouse gas pollution 90 percent between 2035 and 2040 — or shut down.
The highly anticipated regulation being unveiled Thursday morning is just the latest step in President Joe Biden’s campaign to green the U.S. economy, an effort that has brought a counterattack from Republicans and coal-state Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s on top of efforts by Biden’s agencies to promote the use of electric cars, subsidize green energy sources like solar and wind and tighten regulations on products including gas stoves and dishwashers.
The draft power plant rule from the Environmental Protection Agency would break new ground by requiring steep pollution cuts from plants burning coal or natural gas, which together provide the lion’s share of the nation’s electricity. To justify the size of those cuts, the agency says fossil fuel plants could capture their greenhouse gas emissions before they hit the atmosphere — a long-debated technology that no power plant in the U.S. uses now.
As an alternative, utilities could hasten their decisions to shut down their aging coal plants, a trend that has already gathered speed in the past two decades. The rule allows plants that agree to close in the first half of the 2030s to avoid most or all of the pollution-reduction mandates.
Safe, reliable nuclear and fossil fuel powered energy is anathema to the Democratic Party because they can’t rake off enough graft from it. Unless you’re willing to let them shove their disasterous green energy programs down your throat, they want you deplorables sitting in the dark.
Tags: blackout, Energy Policy, EPA, ERCOT, natural gas, Pablo Vegas, Peter Lake, Public Utility Commission (PUC), Regulation, Texas
What did Democrats use before candles…?
Electricity.
[…] Despite complaints of pollution, Energas increases production in Puerto Escondido BattleSwarm: Coming To Texas This Summer: Demand > Supply Behind The Black: Is this ice or lava in the death valley of Mars?, China’s X-37B copy appears to […]
Kirk says: “What did Democrats use before candles…? Electricity.”
As a great but unattributable sage once wrote, “The opposite of communism isn’t capitalism. The opposite of communism is math.”
Texas should start its own subsidy of dispatchable power to allow it to compete fairly.
What would happen if the power generators just said, “NO!”? They will have to shut down? Good luck with that. Time for consumers to decide if they want affordable energy or not. Force their hand – it is empty!
The first diversion of electricity to “buck up” the grid should be from DC and environs – and no diesel-powered back-up generators allowed.
Feds have already shuttered Texas coal power plants near Marshall and at Fairfield. No politician said a thing. I would have figured Abbott would chain his wheelchair to the gates…. But no.
The politicians won’t care until the voters make them care.
When you get down to it, the reason so much of this BS has gotten into place has rather more to do with the background nature of how the environmental types have done it. Nobody sees the immediate effects; they hear “We’re fighting greenhouse gases…”, and don’t connect that with their electricity rates going up. So, they don’t call their representatives, they don’t vote against them, and they don’t even notice the way their pockets are steadily being picked.
Frog in the boiling pot, see?
What the enviro whackos haven’t thought through is what they’re going to do once the water is boiling, and the frog has only good memories of the “old days” and looks at the misery they’re living in, now. The odds are, they won’t be able to explain away the sacrifices or justify them, which is going to lead to a bunch of people winding up as lamp post decorations.
It’s a fraud, pure and simple. Always has been… That carbon we’re burning? All of it was once in the atmosphere, back when the world was a much warmer and congenial place. A vote for these idiots is a vote to go back to the ice, and starve in a cave. They won’t tell you that, however.
On page 81 of the NERC 2022 long term assessment of electricity reliability, you can find the summary for how the real subject matter experts think that things will play out. Here’s where you can get the report from:
https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20DL/NERC_LTRA_2022.pdf
Compared to other regional grids, ERCOT doesn’t look that bad. That says nothing about bad things happening in Texas. If they do, that NERC report is why people will be saying that it couldn’t have been predicted and fixing how NERC lulls people into false complacency would be a major goal.
Rolling blackouts are said to be imminently descending on California but in real life rolling blackouts are landing in Texas with disturbing frequency.
I should note that the state legislature is at least considering requiring the renewables to contract with dispatchable generators for backup power for when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Of course, the renewables are telling any voter who might listen that this is all about “greedy” power plants trying to “raise rates” on consumers.
[…] ERCOT continues to warn of the possibility of rolling blackouts to shed load, but thus far has kept up with demand this summer, despite warnings earlier this year. […]