By Bill King
February 07, 2024
During the recent Winter Storm Heather (Jan. 13-16), the Texas grid was able to produce enough energy to meet the demand, but just barely. Since Winter Storm Uri (February 2021), it appears that improvements have been made to the reliability of natural gas generation. Also, there have been significant additions of renewables capacity, primarily solar, and a small amount of energy storage (batteries). All of these helped to prevent another grid collapse. But we also got lucky. This storm was not nearly as severe as Uri in its intensity, duration, and precipitation.
During the storm, Texans used a wintertime record amount of electricity at 78,138 megawatts on Jan. 16 at 7:50 a.m. At that time, ERCOT’s data showed that the system had 5,229 megawatts in Physical Responsive Capability (PRC). ERCOT begins calling alerts when operating reserves drop below 2,500 megawatts. At 1,500 megawatts, ERCOT begins “controlled outages,” a.k.a. rolling blackouts.
So, it appears to me that at the worst of the storm, we had about 7% in reserves. The amount of reserves as a percentage of the total demand varies dramatically, even within a day, but typically runs in the 10-20% range. So, while we were never in danger of the grid failing this time, I think it is likely that if Heather had been as bad as Uri, the grid would have likely failed again, but perhaps not as badly as it did with Uri.
The recent storm did, however, once again underscore the dilemma Texas faces with its current mix of generation sources. The industry jargon for this is called the “fuel mix.” Texas has the most diverse fuel mix in the country, and many may be surprised to know that Texas generates the highest level of renewables in the country, with wind and solar contributing over 30% of total generation.
Data Source: ERCOT
The Texas grid was primarily designed to perform in the summer heat when demand peaks are generally limited to several hours in the late afternoon and early evening. In the winter, during periods of extreme cold, demand peaks can be much longer. In the case of Uri, the demand peak lasted for several days.
Wind and solar perform better in the summer. Typically, renewables do not perform very well during winter storms. Because of the poorer performance of renewables and prolonged periods of high demand, the Texas grid is much more at risk of catastrophic failure in the winter.
The contribution of wind and solar fell close to zero for several hours during Heather and for several days during Uri. For example, on Jan. 15 at 7:00 a.m., wind was only producing 4,700 megawatts, and solar was at zero. At that time, wind and solar were contributing less than 7% of the electricity Texans were using.
In these situations, the load falls back on other sources, primarily natural gas. Several times during the recent storm, natural gas was generating almost 70% of Texas’ electricity.
This dynamic means that for a reliable grid, we must have sufficient dispatchable generation capacity to make up the difference when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. For now, at least, that is natural gas generation.
But the problem is that when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, wind and solar produce electricity at a significantly lower cost, making it difficult for natural gas to compete during those times. For wind, the cost advantage is almost entirely attributable to government subsidies. But solar comes in a little below natural gas without any subsidy, and the cost of solar continues to drop.
In a market-based system like ERCOT, the competitive problem for natural gas is even more challenging during times when wind and solar are producing a lot of electricity. That is because wind and solar have high upfront capital costs, but the marginal (input) costs are nearly zero. Even when electric prices are very low, wind operators are incentivized to continue to produce because their primary government subsidiary is based on the amount of electricity they produce. In some cases, wind operators will continue to produce at even negative market prices (i.e., the grid is oversupplied with electricity) because they still collect the production tax credit. In contrast, natural gas generators, which have significant fuel and operating costs, cannot afford to continue to produce when the price drops below their input costs.
As a result, there is very little incentive to invest in natural gas generation in Texas today. Texas recently offered a package of incentives to build additional natural gas generation, including low-rate loans. There were no takers.
So, if Texas wants to be assured that it will have adequate dispatchable power for extreme weather conditions, the state is going to have to subsidize it with taxpayer money or require it by regulation, which would ultimately increase rates. I will leave the irony of one government subsidy causing the creation of another government subsidy or additional regulation for another day.
The only other alternative is to build storage capacity for the electricity. Currently, that means batteries. At one point in the recent storm, batteries were contributing over 1,000 megawatts. The all-time record for battery contribution to the grid was 2,172 megawatts in February 2023. So, currently, batteries are making a very small contribution.
There is a building boom in battery storage as electricity users have become increasingly suspect of the grid’s reliability. And we are likely to see that number continue to grow. However, as you can see on the chart above, the cost of battery storage is very high. That will probably come down over time, but it has a long way to go.
Because of cheap natural gas prices and the significant contribution of wind and solar, Texans enjoy some of the lowest electricity prices in the country, running 18% below the national average. But that low cost comes at a price – an inherent lack of reliability in its grid. And it is a savings that is wiped out many times over when a storm like Uri does billions of dollars in damage, not to mention the human toll.
The Texas grid held in this storm, but the long-term issue of building a reliable grid in Texas is far from over.
Bill is a life-long resident of the Houston area. He has enjoyed a varied career as a businessman and a lawyer. Bill was an opinion writer for the Houston Chronicle from 2004-2015, writing over 400 columns and editorials eventually serving on the editorial board. In 1996, Bill was elected to the City Council of Kemah, Texas where later served as mayor of Kemah from 2001-2005. He lost an independent run for mayor of Houston in 2015 in the closest mayoral election in Houston’s history.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
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Extreme weather caused by climate change. Nothing to see here folks move along-
AGL’s Loy Yang A coal plant offline in Latrobe Valley as temperatures soar, thousands left without power (msn.com)
Pretty mild summer but expect more of it in winter with low solar output days-
‘Get used to it’: Bronwyn Bishop slams green ‘zealot’ movement after Vic power outage (msn.com)
Story tip; To fill in what having the energy grid going down could mean, watch this story from Iceland…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7OLs7PbljmA#menu
Thanks, DT!
That video certainly puts the “threats” of catastrophic climate change in perspective! With their hot water heating system down, the Icelanders would probably welcome a little global warming!
ERCOT ==>Electric Reliability Council of Texas
ERCOT doesn’t permit access overseas. Perhaps not even out of state.
Hopefully, Texans will learn from their mistakes and start limiting the amount of unreliable Ruinable energy sources they allow to connect to their grid!
As a neighbor, I am always hoping that things go well for them; while around me I see solar farms being built, and oversized bird blender blades constantly being transported about. I guess I can look forward to rising electricity costs as the “free” sun and wind infect the local grid!
They also need to limit the decommissioning of reliable sources without replacement by additional reliable sources
https://juicetheseries.com/
This is a very realistic look at how precarious energy systems are. Why do people continue to downplay the threat that large scale renewables cause?
Please look at this.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/date-disaster-net-zero-pulling-plug-americas-electrical-life-support-system-new-documentary
“The only other alternative is to build storage capacity for the electricity. Currently, that means batteries. At one point in the recent storm, batteries were contributing over 1,000 megawatts. The all-time record for battery contribution to the grid was 2,172 megawatts in February 2023. So, currently, batteries are making a very small contribution.”
Nuclear?
Unfortunately EIA has no data on batteries, and I have no access to ERCOT from the UK. But I doubt the average duration is much above 1 hour, and batteries will use 25-30% more energy to charge than they resupply. At best they might do a small amount of peak lopping.
I went to look at what the Victorian Big Battery (400MW/400MWh) is doing in Australia, only to find that there was a major trip of coal capacity in the middle of the day a few hours ago. The VBB appears to have been absent from the response, which majored on imports (presumably Snowy hydro mainly) and gas backup.
It’s a big news story
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/power-outage-victoria-loy-yang-a-down-storms-damage-transmission/103461222
It seems it started with the loss of a transmission line due to lightning or storm damage which caused the loss of all units at Loy Yang, and resulted in many other generators being tripped offline. The loss of wind and solar is visible in the chart.
The VBB was almost entirely AWOL.
The storm at 4 a.m. GMT, 2p.m. AEST
Story tip
Blackouts in Victoria following loss of a transmission line and major generator trips at Loy Yang and in wind and solar due to storm and lightning.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/power-outage-victoria-loy-yang-a-down-storms-damage-transmission/103461222
The solution is pretty simple. End all subsidies for everyone and stop distorting the energy market.
“…But solar comes in a little below natural gas without any subsidy, and the cost of solar continues to drop…”
I keep hearing this but it is hard to believe that a system with a large upfront capital cost and operates at peak only about 4 hours per day can be cheaper. Maybe if you game the pricing by not including interconnect costs or the fact that the facility has a markedly shorter lifespan than gas-based generation. Also, someone else has to pick up the tab for grid inertia, so definitely not an apples to apples comparison.
Adding solar to the grid makes electricity more expensive.
Coal and nuclear held up better than in 2021 too.
You’re looking at the Fuel Mix Report, apparently, which really chronicles the unreliability of wind and solar for anyone that bothers to look.
Why are they naming winter storms?
How else are ideologues going to call them ‘superstorms’…? 🙂
The Stor …er… Weather Channel started started that.
But they don’t name particular events like The Blizzard of ’78, they just name each storm front that enters the US.
The front might pass over the entire US with no unusual events but it still has a name.
(As I recall back when they started they approached The National Weather Service to do the same but NWS refused.)
In a few years they’ll start saying things like, “Because of Climate Change, last winter had the most named storms since …”!
The climate alarmists are trying to equate every storm front with hurricanes by giving them names.
Names are useless without dates attached. We should just use the dates for signficant storms, like was done in the past.
This storm naming is just more of Climate Alarmists trying to make something out of nothing when it comes to the weather.
About the irony of having to subsidize gas plants. In the UK, they first subsidized wind and solar, then they had to subsidize coal and gas, then they had to subsidize the consumer.
Sheer madness.
Coal was subjected to far more tax than subsidy. A bare minimum of capacity was awarded Caoacity Market contracts to remain available for emergency use. However, carbon taxes usually prevented any use until the Grid asked them to warm up to meet an evening peak.
And the Germans want to fund new gas plants to fill in the gap when the wind doesn’t blow and from having closed 3 perfectly good nuclear plants and let 6 others sit idle but the EU is blocking it. Since no private companies are interested the state is trying to fund it but the EU object on state aid grounds.
The author points out that wind power does not have fuel costs, and so can sell power for almost nothing. The same goes for nuclear power. Nuclear power has been identified as the biggest threat to wind power. That helps to explain why the “Greens” are against nuclear power.
I think it is more likely that nuclear power lets economies function normally and since the Greenies are communists this is something they do not want.
From what I have read, nuclear is the only traditional power source that will just run 24/7 no matter the price, since the nuclear fuel is “use it or lose it”. This allows it to competitively bid against wind power when rates are very low due to over supply.
Making weather dependent sources, wind and solar, pay directly for their required backup is needed. Subsidies, including production credits, distort the market.
Yep.
I spend most of my time in Gunnison County, CO these days, but still maintain residence in Austin, TX and lived in Austin during Feb 2021 when the natural gas output recovery single-handedly saved Texas from a total blackout. Don’t take my word for that, though, because the ERCOT Fuel Mix Report for 2021 tells the whole story of the wind power’s 6-day absence during that time. The Fuel Mix Report spreadsheet details power output by source in 15-minute intervals.
Because I have a lot of family still in Texas, I drive there a good bit, especially for holidays. Last Thanksgiving I was driving between Lubbock and Sweetwater on Wednesday, 22 November 2023, going South on Hwy 84 where there are literally hundreds — if not thousands — of wind turbines. In the past, I have seen entire sections of turbines not turning, but on this day, only a handful of turbines were turning at all in my 365 degree horizon view. This low output day is also detailed in the ERCOT Fuel Mix Report. I haven’t sorted the spreadsheet yet, but the 22nd may be the lowest output day for the entire month of November.
ERCOT’s Fuel Mix Report provides the most glaring detail of wind and solar’s unreliability, especially in critical weather situations in Texas. See the link below for anyone interested in understanding the predictable result of political shortsightedness in providing government funding of unreliable power sources:
https://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation
I spent a few weeks in Gunnison back in the late ’70s. (Beautiful country. Climbed Mt. Yale.)
I also lived in Texas for a year back in the early ’70s. When I was in San Angelo I worked in a lumber yard. We made a delivery out toward, I think it was Midland.
The road bed was raised and the cab of the flatbed put us above the Mesquite trees. Open vistas as far as the eye can see.
I shudder to think that those open vistas are now “gone with the wind”.
Yeah, it’s bad. Here in Colorado the solar farms are popping up everywhere and they’re worse than the wind farms.
Here is the ERCOT data from November 2023. Looks like that day was the poorest out put, but it had some competition!
I figured it had competition because I have driven through that part of West Texas on any number of occasions and seen large swathes of turbines not turning.
Here is a graphic in mid January from ERCOT.
The marked variation in the wind electricity is entirely due to weather. The natural gas variation is entirely due to:
No other fuel can provide what natural gas does. Hydro is too limited. Coal and nuclear are more baseline providers. Without a robust natural gas infrastructure, wind and solar will be impossible to implement on a large scale.
The Austin Unamerican Statesman portrayed Feb 2021 as strictly an issue with natural gas, completely omitting the wind failure component. At the time, I could still comment on a variety of articles and I commented whenever possible that the assertion natural gas was the issue was false and shown to be so by the ERCOT Fuel Mix Report. I was shortly prohibited from commenting. But, then, the Statesman has always been a left-leaning publication with little to no interest in accuracy.
They were recently given an award for their reporting on the Uvalde school shooting and without so much as a simple question as to the motivations of the Uvalde Chief of Police’s order not to storm the classrooms while children were being killed. As someone that has also lived on the Texas-Mexico border, the lack of media interest in that factoid stands out glaringly.
And our Texas legislators authorized paying millions of dollars to developers to produce this intermittent energy, all to solve a nonexistent problem
exactly.
ERCOT can only manage the resources available but gets the blame for the Legislature’s (IMO mostly lawyers and opportunist grifters) shortsightedness and dirth of STEM, business and economic knowledge
it appears that improvements have been made to the reliability of natural gas generation.
No, there was no problem with reliable natural gas generation. The problem was load shedding pipeline compressors and load shedding half the cooling water pumps at the nuke. ERCOT recommended evaluating “critical energy infrastructure” in a revised load shedding plan. Looks like they implemented the improvements.
The sequence was this:
Failure of Wind > Load shed compressors > Load shed pumps at nuke > shutdown of NG fired power plants > Emergency shutdown of nuke.
Lowest temp in Dallas in Jan was +10 while Uri was -2 so not a real test. But Dallas has seen -8 so URI not the best test either.
We switched from mostly coal to mostly gas and gas, a fluid, turns out to have serious problems in extreme cold. PJM almost went black in Elliot in 2021 due to gas supply failure. And it has been much colder than Elliot but we were running on coal then, where supply is a big pile at the powerplant.
Reliable, as applied to the “grid” would be based on reliable generation. Perhaps we should talk in terms of distribution grid robustness, since this piece shows that the grid is reliable to the point it has been tested, so far.
A sixteenth inch of ice precipitation, over a very small area, could have drastically changed this story . Winter isn’t over yet, and the end of the historic extreme cold vulnerability period is even further out.
Hate the nonsensical practice of naming winter storms, it makes the general public think something new is going on.
The same system hit us first here in Alberta, record cold (4days) but for a shorter time than in 2021 (10 days).
Here we have installed 6GW (4.5gw wind, 1.5GW solar), as our max demand is ~12GW that means we have installed “nameplate capacity” of 50%.
But on the evening of Jan13 there was zero solar, and because we were below -30 (-41C) the wind turbines are locked down regardless of whether there is any wind or not, so they don’t catastrophically fail due to cold.
So, zero, and does not matter if we had 60GW instead of 6, any number times zero is zero..
Need to re-open coal or go nuclear.
“Hate the nonsensical practice of naming winter storms, it makes the general public think something new is going on.”
Yep. The Storm Channel started that. They just name winter weather fronts passing through.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they start to push for naming fronts that might produce a thunderstorm somewhere during the summer.
Naming hurricanes or just low depressions isn’t enough!
(Need more “Scare Effect”.)
An honest question from “Mr. Layman”.
Aside from power lines going down during a storm, when have the power sources been compromised before wind and solar were added to the mix?
Again, an honest question.
Natural gas supply to power plants was a big problem in Texas, and in PJM Christmas 2022. Once a big ice storm froze the coal piles and the eastern US almost went down. Nothing is foolproof. Even nukes can fail.
The February 2021 storm had a domino-like set of characteristics affecting both natural gas and turbine provision. When it first rolled through, it froze turbines and natural gas transmission valves. The problem was made worse by the fact many of the gas transmission stations also depended on turbine-provided electricity. Once the storm rolled through there was little or no wind — as is often the case with Texas cold fronts — and wind turbines generally need something on the order of 12mph of wind to generate usage power.
Natural gas did recover to a point where it singlehandedly kept Texas from a real blackout, but that process was not without pain because significant emergency power generation had to be put into place to get that flow rolling again.
I had no power for four days, but I had natural gas stove and hot water heater, and I kept a pretty healthy flow of water running and never had water interrupted. So I could cook, take hot showers and heat my house with the stove to some extent. I fared much better than my neighbors, most of whom fled to hotels that still power and heat.