There is no economic leadership for the United States without an urgent restructuring of the power grid with distributed energy, solar, wind, and storage, in mind.
Just last week, the Texas grid came perilously close to crashing yet again.
Besides low reserves, ERCOT said it issued Wednesday’s emergency alert because of a “drop in frequency,” which refers to the generation of electrical power. A spokesperson for ERCOT did not immediately return an email seeking comment on what caused the drop in frequency.
Thomas Overbye, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University, said such a frequency drop is usually caused by a large power plant going offline, which could have a significant impact.
“These generators have been running, you know, a lot all summer. So that means that maintenance that we might want to do on a generator, they’re probably deferring into the time when the temperatures are a little cooler,” said Overbye, who also is director of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s Smart Grid Center.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has said improvements since 2021 have stabilized the grid. Earlier this year, Texas lawmakers passed bills aimed at luring developers to generate more “on-demand” electricity, but the legislation did not extend to renewable sources.
Many Texans remain skeptical of the grid’s reliability.
The state’s grid operator pinned the blame for a hiccup that led to a grid emergency this week on inadequacies in the infrastructure it uses to move power across the state.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said late Thursday that speculation that a gas- or coal-fired power plant tripped offline was incorrect. Rather, it pointed to what it called “transmission limitations” that restricted its ability to move power from South Texas — where wind power was plentiful — to where it was needed elsewhere in the state.
“Limitations,” grid experts said, could either mean a transmission line failed or that a pathway for power became so overloaded during the evening’s high-demand period that it ceased being able to function.
“There’s only so much traffic a highway can carry, and the same is true with what a transmission line can carry,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. “There’s only so much power it can move before it gets full. … And, like a highway, when you have a lot of cars on the road, there’s more likely to be an accident.”