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.
