The old saw, “Everything is bigger in Texas,” may soon be coming true once again, as the Nueces River Authority has revealed plans for a deepwater desalination plant off Harbor Island near Corpus Christi that would immediately become the nation’s largest – and with planned expansions by 2070, larger than all but two of the world’s existing desalination plants.
Desalination today provides potable water to billions of people worldwide, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and other Middle Eastern countries leading the way. The world’s largest, Ras at Khair in Saudi Arabia, has a capacity of 228 million Imperial gallons per day (MIGD).
A 2022 report stated that of the approximately 17,000 operational desalination facilities globally, only about 300 were in the U.S., led by 167 in Florida, 58 in California, and 52 in Texas. The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest U.S. desalination plant and currently the world’s ninth largest, supplies up to 50 MIGD to the city of San Diego.
Seven of the next nine largest U.S. desalination plants are in Florida, but ranking fifth is the Kay Bailey Hutchison facility in El Paso, which opened in 2007. The El Paso facility, however, is also the world’s largest inland desalination plant, cleaning up to 27.5 million gallons per day (Mgpd) of brackish water for use at Fort Bliss and in El Paso.
Close behind is the H2Oaks facility in San Antonio, which opened in 2017 and currently produces up to 12 Mgpd, with plans to expand capacity to 30 Mgpd by 2040.
When Alice, Texas, decided to expand capacity for its own brackish-water desalination plant in 2022, it became the first brackish-water desalination plant in the state to employ a public-private partnership rather than rely on 100% financing from theState Water Implementation Fund for Texas (SWIFT).
Florida-based Seven Seas Water Group convinced Alice officials that by financing the desalination plant with private sector capital and completing the source wells and pipelines with state revolving fund financing, the city could lower its water supply costs while transferring the risks of construction and operations to Seven Seas. After 15 years, the city can assume ownership of the facility.
John Byrum, Executive Director of the Nueces River Authority, says the NRA intends to use that same route for construction and operation of its planned 100 Mgpd phase 1 desalination plant (twice the size of the Carlsbad plant), which could become operational within the next few years. The system design includes options to increase capacity to 450 Mgpd by 2070, depending on growth and water needs.
Byrum points to current drought conditions and to a 2015 NASA prediction that the American West is likely to experience severe “megadroughts” that may be more extreme and prolonged than even the droughts of the 1930s. Lake Corpus Christi and the Choke Canyon Reservoir, which service south central Texas, are currently at 17.9% of their combined capacity.
Bynum’s team has obtained water needs projections from every public and large private water user in a 14-county area in the Region L water planning area in search of water purchase commitments from the proposed desalination facility. The NRA is working with the Port of Corpus Christi, which has applied for permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the intake and water diversion structures for the planned facility.
The NRA is also negotiating a lease with the Port of Corpus Christi for the Harbor Island property, which is east of the city near the Port Aransas ferry dock.
Just as Alice relied on a public-private partnership, the NRA facility would be financed via a public-private partnership in which the Authority would construct and operate the conveyance system to distribute the water while a very experienced desalination company would build and operate the plant at least until the debt owed to the company was fully repaid.
Byrum says the waste material would be sent, with negligible environmental impact, into deep water in the Gulf of America, though it is possible that the brine could first be “mined” for valuable minerals. Another benefit from using desalinated water is that, as this “new water” is processed through wastewater treatment after use it adds to streamflow in south central Texas’ parched Frio and Nueces Rivers.
While the NRA facility is being designed to serve the area’s large industrial facilities as well as smaller communities in need of additional potable water, the City of Corpus Christi is awaiting final permits before moving forward with construction of its own 30 Mgpd desalination plant, to be built in the ship channel in the inner harbor. The city’s contractor, Texas-based Kiewit Infrastructure South Co., which has designed and built several desalination plants, anticipates it could complete construction by early 2028.
Texas is hardly done with desalination projects. The Southmost Regional Water Authority just announced plans to double the capacity of its Brownsville brackish water desalination plant from 10 Mgpd to 20 Mgpd at a cost of $213 million. Brownsville Mayor John Cowen is seeking funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for the project, which is needed to serve area industries and its growing population.
Earlier, the Laguna Madre Water District announced plans to build a 10 Mgpd reverse osmosis seawater desalination plant in Port Isabel using Gulf of America water from the Brownsville Ship Channel. LMWD general manager Carlos Galvan says district voters had approved a $15.6 million bond in 2011 to build the plant, which is being augmented by a $10 million SWIFT loan.
The SWIFT program, housed within the Texas Water Development Board, has committed nearly $11.5 billion to fund implementation of recommended water management strategy projects within the state’s water plan since 2017. This revolving loan fund is a huge part of the state’s long-term water security strategy as Texas continues to add people and industrial facilities.
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Probably a good time to recap my plan for load-following nuclear power.
Nuclear is great baseload. But you can’t ramp it up or down very fast or very many times. Doesn’t like that. It’s no good at what’s called “load following”, rapidly increasing or decreasing the amount generated to match the variations in the load.
So … I propose pairing nuclear power plants each with a desalinization plant. Use part of the nuclear power to run a desalinization plant with say 100 pumps, each powering its own section.
Then, as the load shifts, the number of pumps can be varied to use up any spare power at all times.
Presto! Load following nuclear!
And the beauty part?
If you do that, you don’t need fossil powered “peaker” plants to cover times of high demand. One nuclear plant can cover it all.
w.
WE, very clever. Mosher has a company in Finland doing the ‘same’, except using bitcoin ‘mining’ data centers rather than desalination.
Interesting about Mosh, Rud. Give him my regards if you see him.
What I liked in particular is that you end up with a power and water company, so you have two independent cash streams.
w.
WE. He, CR, and I have an irregular lunch together at CR’s favorite north Fort Lauderdale Tiki Bar. You have been there with your beautiful ex financee. Mosher is still rehabilitating from a stroke.
I’d heard about Mosh’s stroke, a tragedy for a brilliant man. Best wishes to him.
w.
Gold Star for today!
Here in the Indian Wells Valley, CA we are in a slow moving water disaster. I think we (the water users) are going to build a pipeline to connect with California aqueduct water piped north to California City. I don’t know how much it’s going to cost but I say $500 million in rough terms. We have lots of brine in the basin
Better than a bullet train.
At least that pain train nonsense is spread out. We here in the IWV are pretty much paying for this pipeline ourselves. I’m not complaining (though I am trying to move away)
I didn’t make it clear; we have lots of briny water that could be desalinated. Mostly under the NAVAIR China Lake North Range.
“the number of pumps can be varied to use up any spare power at all times”
A great adjunct to wind and solar too!
Nick,
Why not tell readers how much major desal plants cost Australian every day, producing water that is mostly not needed with green electricity that is far more expensive than advertised? Geoff S
Geoff,
Why don’t you?
Because you as a mathematician, are much more capable than I am to summarise national economic numbers. I am merely an experienced scientist. Geoff S
I’m sure ChatGPT can do it better.
Nick,
It’s ok to say “I don’t know”.
Don’t know how much the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane desal plants cost per day, quite a lot to be kept on standby though..
… and they produce very little water anyway 😉
Only time the Brisbane one was used was for the week or so after the floods a few years ago, because their main water treatment plant got flooded.
Haven’t heard much about the Adelaide plant, except that its location is not good because the salt water outflow doesn’t distribute fast enough.
Only place that actually uses Desal is Perth, I think they now have 4 plants operating.
Perth Western Australia has three desal plants open, the fourth is still being built. These provide a significant amount of Perth’s water. Perth sits on an aquifer that also provides bore water for lawns and gardens. WA has access to plentiful amounts of cheap gas, so the energy required to run the desal plants is reasonably cheap.
Nick, I’m not sure what you mean by “A great adjunct to wind and solar too!”.
Is there a point to wind and solar when you have a nuclear power station?
Wind and solar are fine to fill niches – and can be cost effective depending on circumstances. Problems like the failed Ivanpah solar plant occur. $2000000000 down the drain, as it turned out.
Apart from anything else, some “experts” believed that heat could be “stored”. Not really, in any useful sense. Back in 2016, Ivanpah was producing about 30% of its output by burning gas. So much for “storing heat” overnight!
In 2020, this solar plant produced over 80,000 metric tons of CO2 equivant emissions. Not bad for a “solar” power plant.
That’s all wind and solar are good for: producing power for non-critical, non-on-demand uses, if the wind and sunshine are there.
So the water tanks become a sort of battery – the desalination wouldn’t be able to work full blast all the time, but water demand can be satisfied from the water tanks when the Sun is shining enough during the day and the tanks can be replenished overnight whenever the wind feels like blowing. Much cheaper than batteries for electrical storage.
“the water tanks”
Normally it would augment a city supply backed by reservoirs.
The Canary Islands have used that system for years; for instance – on Tenerife there’s a big desalinization plant a few miles east of the southern airport with 1,000s of solar panels & ~ 40 wind turbines supplying water to the southern tourist area; plus dozens of other smaller plants around the coast.
And they still have diesel generators supplying power.
Yes, they have some, but it’s mainly gas turbines & hydro for base load with a small % of solar & wind.
The island has several geothermal power plants.
Most domestic hot water is by solar thermal
The primary sources of electricity on the island include:
Gas & Oil 60%
Renewables (Hydro, Solar, Wind, Geothermal) 40%.
Tenerife has a rich reserve of oil and natural gas deposits.
The Santa Cruz de Tenerife refinery closed in 2022 (after 90 years of production) because it’s cheaper to ship in the finished products.
And Gran Canaria is building a 200MW pumped hydro scheme that is due to be completed by 2027.
If you want to see how ineffective ruinables are,
look at the island of ‘El Hierro’ … small population(11,000), lots of sun & almost constant wind plus a 200MW pumped hydro scheme, should be a doddle … but … & at a Cost of $10,000 per capita.
https://euanmearns.com/el-hierro-another-model-for-a-sustainable-energy-future/
& another remote island community also with lots of sun & almost constant wind; King Island originally designed for 95% renewables, but overall it has achieved less than 40%.
https://www.hydro.com.au/clean-energy/hybrid-energy-solutions/success-stories/king-island.
So if they can’t get to nut zero nobody can !!!
Why waste money on wind and solar?
Apart from slaughtering endangered raptors, ordinary birds, bats, and whales, devastating pristine vistas with industrial machines, clear cutting ancient forests, and generating untold tons of non-recyclable blade waste, I can see no downsides to windmills, Nick. Good point!
Are you proposing to turn off blocks of desal filters as external demand rises?
If so, you’ll probably run into higher operating costs for the desal plants. Like most filters, they operate best in a continuous basis, then a wash cycle and then back to filtering. Moth balling a filter system is not as simple as just turning off. The life of the filter depends on the salts being removed and not staying too long in contact.
They also don’t like being operated too fast or too slow, so ramping them up and down is not a good solution either.
The best I could come up with is to pump raw water to a storage tank when external demand is low and then stop that pump when the demand is high. But that’s a very small part of the desal load.
Probably best to have the nuclear system appended to with peaking gas plants or hydro. Just like the present.
Sorry Willis, have to disagree this time.
During operation, a desal plant requires constant pressure, except for backwash cycles.
You cannot have fluctuating energy supply.
He’s saying that you take units offline when external demand rises. To be more precise, switch to backflush and then power off. Then as demand slackens, restart one unit at a time.
There would be many small units. I’m sure he said 100 so that we could think in terms of % capacity, but it could be thousands. It could be a variable load on the nuclear plant from 0 to 100% of its full load in 1% or smaller increments. You could size the desal array so that it could soak up all of the nuke capacity above the minimum base load demand.
No single unit would ever be operated with less than optimal pressure.
The other point is that you store the potable water and deliver it on demand. You only produce water when demand is low but you have capacity to deliver variable supplies of water, independent of power demand.
Willis,
I was thinking the exact same thing when I read this post. Desalination requires energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
Cheers!
Some reactor designs can ramp up/down more quickly. I’m no nuclear engineer. One of them could probably explain the variations.
The issue with thermal reactors and load following is dealing with Xenon buildup at lower power levels. A molten salt reactor may be more amenable to load following as the Xenon can easily be removed – which also improves neutron economy. Fast reactors may also be more amenable to load following as Xenon doesn’t absorb fast neutrons.
IMO, an ideal solution would be a combination of nuclear for base load, rooftop solar for daytime peaks and batteries for the evening peaks. With this arrangement, the batteries only need to handle about 4 hours of difference between base load and peak demand. EV’s could play a role by raising demand late night/early morning.
Yeah, if you believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Problem is, rooftop solar works somewhat in a desert, not so much in a high-latitude rain-soaked locale.
Since global warming, irrespective of whether any of it is anthropogenic, is wholly beneficial to human flourishing, the only arguments for combatting it would be that you hate humanity and/or you have a scheme to get rich selling worthless kit to clueless true believers.
“you have a scheme to get rich selling worthless kit to clueless true believers.”
Which represents at least 35% of the general population! Not a bad business plan.
Willis, with respect, that view of nuclear plant flexibility is a bit out of date. While it is best for economics for nukes to be run as baseload, modern plants can and do load follow quite well. The French led the way in this with their large fleet. There’s even a European standard:
“For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR), the nuclear power plant must be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power, with a rate of change of the electric output of 3-5% of rated power per minute.”
That rate of change is similar to a CCGT plant and possibly better than coal, aiui.
More info: https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/reactor-operation/normal-operation-reactor-control/load-following-power-plant/
Thanks, Mike, that’s great news.
w.
There’s another permutation worth considering.
Most desalination in the US is electrically driven – RO plants. Most desalination in the world is thermally driven – distillation plants.
The nuclear plant can produce thermal energy which is dynamically routed to the steam turbines to make electricity or to the distillation plant.
This is pretty close to how oil-fired power and water desalination plants in the middle east operate.
You could also desalinate using the heat from the power plant to desal by evaporation.
WE:
Your proposal is essentially what an MIT group recommended in 2021 instead of closing the Diablo Canyon facility. But California, being California, wasn’t interested.
Thanks, Alan. So I saved the big bucks by not going to MIT? Good news! …
w.
If this process has been working in a number of countries already, why not adopt it where there are concerns about fresh water supplies? My only concern is that governments, always on the lookout for revenue sources, will find one excuse or another to hit consumers with some sort of taxes ostensibly for processing the water to remove potential contamination from every impurity under the sun. and for protecting the environment from these removed impurities which supposedly could be dumped anywhere. I’m sure some academics, environmentalists, and bureaucrats are already dreaming up schemes for convincing lawmakers to introduce such taxes.
Puts more new continuous load on ERCOT, piling on to previous post.
Ras al Khair comprises 2400 MW of CCGT (exactly same as newish Port Everglades here), of which 200MW feeds hybrid desalination, and the rest feeds the grid, including for a large nearby aluminum smelter. Hybrid desalination= 8 flash evaporator pans also condensing the steam part of the combined cycle for water reuse, plus 17 RO. Very clever engineering by South Korea’s Doosan.
Anywhere the words “aluminum smelter” appear, one must think “inexpensive electricity”.
Cheaper to use Saudi natgas to smelt aluminum than to convert to LNG to ship to Europe.
Also less polluting than using coal to generate electricity for aluminum smelting.
Anyone have a good ballpark estimate for the current cost per gallon to desalinate sea water?
Or, cost per gallon based on electricity available at a price of $X/kWh?
Thinking of comparison to truck-transported spring water?
No, just the comparison to pipelines, canals, better catchment of surface waters.
I used to be down in SE Colorado a lot. The land is in the rain lee of the Rockies, but there are an amazing number of canals that divert water for agricultural purposes.
They look pretty cheap to construct and transport significant amounts of water a long way.
pillage,
You might get a feel from here: Geoff S
The Real Cost of Desalination Plant: How Operating Expenses Can Triple Your 30-Year Water Project Budget | Medium
Thanks, sherro!
Your link is a very nice primer on the topic.
“Desalination today provides potable water to billions of people worldwide”
Billions strikes me as an exaggeration.
History of Israel’s water program which makes extensive use of desalination:
“Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World” by Seth M. Siegel (2017)
Amazon’s blurb from link:
“The U.S. government predicts that forty of our fifty states-and 60 percent of the earth’s land surface-will soon face alarming gaps between available water and the growing demand for it. Without action, food prices will rise, economic growth will slow, and political instability is likely to follow.”
Is it written from a resource depletion perspective (I hope not)?
Thanks to enhanced CO2 levels, agriculture doesn’t need as much water.
“Soon”
“Alarming”
“Likely”
Click bait.
I was thinking the same thing – “billions”???
How can billions of the world population, afford desalination for water?
Maybe they mean 1.01 billion as meaning billions since it’s more than one.
Google gives confusing results – the AI is innumerate.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=how%20many%20people%20depend%20on%20desalinated%20water
Says currently 1% of the world’s population depends on desalination but also gives a figure of 300 million which is like 3.5%
Try Grok. Dueling AIs.
What if Grok calls ChatGPT for it’s answers 🙂
Are they going after the avocado market?
Got a related science question. There have been articles now and then about devices which suck water vapor out of their air, and although “suck” is certainly not very scientific, it will do; IANAS. The ones I remember relied on surface structures which mimic lily pads, frogs, and so on, where the air’s water vapor condenses out. There was a report just a few days ago of a non-plastic organic fabric which soaks up water vapor, then releases it when heated, and it seemed to have good prospects for eventually being engineered into an actually useful product. Some only collected fog water, others collected regular water vapor, even in low-humidity deserts. I’ve always thought of them as “devaporators” but none have even developed into real products that I remember, such as for hikers, survival kits, etc.
Suppose someone did develop a portable fabric or solid surface that could, say, unfold into a 1 meter square surface which collected a liter an hour, and could be combined into bigger structures which could collect 1000 liters a day, enough to replace a good well, or even be grouped for use on farms to replace irrigation canals and piping.
How would the local atmosphere react? My first guess is the dried air would be lighter and rise. But aside from that, how would such a locally drier atmosphere affect vegetation or animals nearby? Obviously wouldn’t be too much of a problem in deserts, but what if it reduced the humidity around a Gulf Coast community from 90% to only 70%?
Just curious. The recent announcement I saw was the first one that seemed possibly practical, and it made me curious. I’m not curious about whether such structures are actually possible, only what affects they would have.
There might also be cases where moving the people to where the water already sits is better than moving more water to where the populations are increasing. But I am not a town planner. Geoff S
How would you move said people closer to the water? Rail cars and cattle prods?
Usually talk of urban planning and doing what’s best for humanity ends up staying into Nazi-Socialist-Communist territory.
The best you could do is use the carrot approach to at least bribe the people to go.
This would be particularly useful in areas with frequent fog or maritime air flows that otherwise receive little precipitation, like Southern and Central California. Mediterranean and coastal semi-arid climates. They’re doing it now in Chile around the Atacama Desert. As for how much it could influence the local climates in such regions, I would say not very much, certainly not on the order of UHI.
I think the desert would observe the greatest effects of the dewatering process.
The coastal areas would replenish their humidity relatively fast, the desert, not so. Anything that relied on the natural moisture would surely suffer.
There is an old desert trick that works when not too dry. Scoop a big bowl in the sand, cover with plastic, collect night condensation at dawn.
As old as plastic anyway.
A variant of that might also work in not desert regions.
Dig your bowl. Put vegetation in it around a container to collect the water. Put the plastic over the hole with a pebble directly above the container.
The condensation will run along the plastic and drip into the container.
(The vegetation is to provide an extra source of water vapor.)
Oh gosh I read that “Dig your bowl. Put -A VEGETARIAN- in it…”
I hope global warming doesn’t wipe out coffee or the vegetarians might be doomed by Monday morning bureaucracy.
“non-plastic organic fabric which soaks up water vapor, then releases it when heated.
Not sure about that – so you have to heat the fabric to presumably vaporise the water, and drivesit out of the fabric? Or would it dribble out in the form of water?
Dried air is actually heavier than water vapour, so in still conditions would just accumulate near ground level, leaving your fabric dry – presumably any water it had absorbed would simply evaporate into the dry air surrounding it.
It might just be cheaper to buy water online and have it shipped.
“Dried air is actually heavier than water vapour” Doesn’t seem to make sense from a molecular standpoint. Clouds are high. I’ll google and learn.
Yup, MF is correct. “As a mixture of gases, air doesn’t have a constant density; this value depends largely on air composition. Most components have similar densities and don’t influence the overall density in a substantial way. One exception is water vapor; the more water vapor in the air, the lower its density“
Those planning large desalination plants can learn much from the sad history of Australia. Warning, Internet searches are contaminated by green gobblydegook, putting lipstick on the pig.
Australia’s eastern large cities were stampeded into building desal plants by tainted green propaganda with prominent pressure from mammologist Tim Flannery.
“METEOROLOGISTS suggested Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery leave weather forecasting to them as the big wet defies his prediction rain would become scarce. In 2007 Professor Flannery said Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane were in urgent need of desalination plants. Four years on, Warragamba Dam is on the verge of overflowing and Brisbane last year endured the worst flooding in almost four decades. After yesterday discovering Professor Flannery is not a meteorologist, the Weather Channel’s meteorologists said it was probably best he left the forecasting to them.”
Weather’s just not your forte, Tim | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site
Melbourne was also influenced to build a plant in 2007. It was finished in 2012 and immediately mothballed. First public water use was in March 2017.
These white elephants are expensive, because they degrade if not kept operating. This produces costly water. Being green ideas, of course green electricity is ideal to power them. Both the desal plant and the green electricity operators still get paid for non-producing, by some strange economic theory. Properly accounted, Australia’s green electricity is 2 to 4 times more expensive than the coal-fired electricity that we had before the Millennium Drought.
Econocide: green subsidies are hastening our energy demise | The Spectator Australia
Yes, there is a need for desalination plans, but plan with trusted data, not internet pulp fiction reports. Geoff S
Always thought that this would be a great co (tri?) generation application for a Fischer-Tropsch facility. A small autothermal reformer based unit rated for 10MBPD liquids produces on the order of 1MM Lb/Hr of 1000# steam and another 1MM Lb/Hr of 600# steam. Use topping turbines to equalize the steam and bring it into spec for an MSF Desal unit. You could easily desal 2 MMGPH of water plus some electricity plus the F-T liquid products.
Oh No! This will make the sea more alkaline….a bit.
Actually Mike, with desal, you have to be very careful about the dispersion of the brine outflow..
… or it can cause cause significant damage to sea-life in the area.
Perth has good currents flowing past the outfalls, so dispersion/dilution is not generally a problem.
If you put the outflow into an enclosed bay, like Adelaide does, even if its a very big bay, you can cause problems.
Not sure what effect the Israeli desal plants have on the Mediterranean Sea.
Two gripes:
It’s Ras al Khair
And what century is the author living in? How long has it been since any country has used imperial gallons? My friend Grok says that the last holdout gave up imperial gallons thirty years ago!
One is as arbitrary as the other.
The article is a bit vague about disposal of the waste. I am curious about waste volume and exactly how the dumping process is accomplished. Is it a dedicated dump or is it coupled with commercial transport? I assume it is dispersed and not concentrated.
It would seem there’d be a market for the concentrated solids removed whether the desal plant used evaporation/condensation or RO which concentrates the minerals removed.
Many industrial processes produce a waste product (sometimes hazardous at that concentration) which another process can then convert into something useful.
I understand but the article said something about dumping the waste in the deep ocean.
Depreciation without revenue is the true cost of low capacity factor. The lower your fuel costs, the higher the capital cost, the worse the problem.
I asked ChatGPT:
Yes, there’s a growing market for this kind of electricity arbitrage, often referred to as demand response or flexible industrial loads. Instead of storing excess power, industries adjust their operations to take advantage of cheap or negative-priced electricity during high wind or solar production. Key examples include:
Aluminum smelting – Electrolysis is highly electricity-intensive and can be ramped up or down.
Hydrogen production – Electrolyzers can run when electricity is cheap, producing hydrogen for later use.
Cryptocurrency mining – Bitcoin mining operations frequently move to locations with surplus renewable energy.
Water desalination – Can run intermittently when power is available.
Cold storage and refrigeration – Can overcool when power is cheap and coast through higher-price periods.
Many industrial users are already leveraging this, but regulatory and infrastructure challenges still exist. The market for such flexible loads will likely expand as renewables grow.