UPDATE:
Deadly heat that has gripped Texas for much of the summer has spread into other parts of the central U.S. this week where it is forecast to stay for days, with triple-digit temperatures buckling roads, straining water systems and threatening the power grid of the nation’s energy capitol.
With heat warnings and advisories stretching from New Orleans to Minneapolis, the unyielding weather is stressing the systems put in place to keep resources moving and people safe. Just this week, a 1-year-old left in a hot van in Nebraska died, and Louisiana reported 25 heat-related deaths this summer — more than twice the average number in recent years.
The heat is expected to become “dangerous to the average person” if they don’t have air conditioning, said Alex Lamers, a warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.
It has felt hotter than 110 degrees (43.3 C) in cities in Texas and Louisiana more often than at any time since World War II, Lamers said. The brunt of the enduring heat has hit states from Florida to New Mexico, he said.
Texas’ grid — which failed during a deadly winter storm in 2021 — has so far held up with no outages in the face of unrelenting heat.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid, asked residents twice last week to conserve energy because of high demand and low reserves. The agency issued a weather watch that’s in place through Aug. 27.
But there are risks the longer this drags on, said Alison Silverstein, a Texas-based independent energy analyst and former adviser to the state’s energy regulator. She compared it to a car overheating as the system tries to keep up with weeks of record-breaking demand.
“At least your car on a long trip has a chance to rest overnight and cool off,” she said. “A lot of these plants have been running nonstop, or pretty close to it, since June.”
Texas Energy Analyst Doug Lewin:
Scenario #1: Too Real
At 4pm, you issue a call asking Texans to voluntarily conserve energy from 7–10pm. You hope this will help moderate demand, but you don’t know if it will. Indeed, since you just called for conservation three days before, it’s possible that people will be put off by the request to cut back again and will decide to use even more. That’s not even necessarily an illogical or mean-spirited decision; if the grid doesn’t hold, they might figure they’d be more comfortable if they can cool down the house as much as possible before the power goes out — especially if they don’t trust you to keep the lights on.
But anyway, you make the conservation call, and the grid keeps running. Data might show, say, that demand dropped 3.2% in the first hour of the call — less than it did the day before (a 3.4% drop on Saturday) at the same time, without a conservation call.
So your conservation call either didn’t do anything, or it backfired. And you’re left wondering, what if this happens again? What if the temperatures are higher when folks go back to work? What if more power plants trip off line?
As you may have gathered, this isn’t hypothetical — it’s what played out on the state’s grid over the weekend.
Scenario #2: Caring about (and Rewarding) Consumers
Same setup: coal and gas plants unexpectedly trip offline, huge electricity demand surges in the heat … But, because you have put forethought into exactly this kind of scenario and included consumers in the process of designing solutions, you have levers you can pull. First thing you notice is that solar panels across Texas are cranking out electricity at record-breaking levels. That means there’s going to be plenty of power until 7:00, when the sun starts to set in West Texas.
In this scenario, to mitigate the dual problems of reliability and affordability, you’ve been working year-round with load-serving entities like municipal utilities, co-ops, and retail electric providers to sign up customers for demand response programs. You would have crafted consumer-facing offerings that use technology to reduce customers’ energy use — in ways that they don’t notice and don’t miss — when the grid gets stretched, and that financially reward Texans who sign up. Most Texans won’t sign up and that’s fine. So long as some do, everyone benefits.
Having created that very affordable foundation of flexible load, you could then send a signal on Sunday evening to the load-serving entities, knowing that you have several thousand megawatts of demand that will automatically come offline when needed.
This is the cheaper, more reliable, less dramatic (and terrifying) world that Texans could live in with better policies. We need leaders who better understand the options and put consumers’ needs at the center of their policymaking.
Well, it’s 10pm. It’s currently 93°F here in Austin, but I see that the crunch has passed on the ERCOT dashboard, so I’m ready to start doing laundry. The dishwasher can be set to start at 5am.
That used to be my schedule for a few weeks during the hotter parts of the summer, but now it’s just the all summer long.