Texas legislature doing its best to push gas and suppress renewables, still, it’s added solar and batteries that are keeping the lights on in bad weather.
Doug Lewin’s Texas Energy and Power Substack:
As Winter Storm Enzo approached Texas this weekend, the chances of rolling outages looked slim.
Temperatures didn’t look cold enough to spike demand to unservable levels or trigger mass freeze-offs in oil and gas fields or power plants. Enzo also was forecast to be a very windy system.
Fortunately, all of those things held true.
There was no energy emergency this week. More than that, energy prices never even reached $150 per megawatt hour — prices stayed 97% below the $5,000 wholesale power cost cap. There was plenty of power to go around.
Turns out a diverse resource mix — where solar, storage, gas, wind and nuclear plants are all working together to meet demand — is quite a good thing.
But the storm also offered serious warning signs for the Texas grid. Legislators and energy leaders would be smart to heed them.
Flashing Red Lights
During the last three serious winter storms, the average statewide low temperature hit 6°F in Feb. 2021, 13°F in Dec. 2022, and 15°F in Jan. 2024. Based on average low temperatures in the major metro areas, the statewide average low over the last few nights was likely well above 20°F, probably somewhere in the top left of the graph below.
Nevertheless, we had the third highest-ever winter demand on Wednesday morning — Texans used about 1,000 megawatts less electricity this morning than they did last year, even though it was considerably warmer.
What mark would the grid have to hit in a repeat of 2021’s traumatic Winter Storm Uri? The old ERCOT projection was 92,000 megawatts. But a recently updated and fairly obscure report (the 2024 Long-Term Hourly Peak Demand and Energy Forecast) now projects demand would reach 97,541 megawatts under Uri-like conditions.
That’s not a future projection of load growth. That’s right now — what we would have needed this morning if Winter Storm Enzo had been Winter Storm Uri.
By next year, it’ll be over 100,000 megawatts.
Why So High?
When temperatures drop into the single digits, resistance heaters in three million Texas homes are running flat out. Residential load increases by tens of thousands of megawatts.
Unfortunately, those low temperatures also start disrupting gas supply and freezing power plants of all kinds, causing many to drop offline.
When it’s that cold, lots of things break.
Extra high demand (driven by inefficient heat) and constricted supply (driven by lower gas and generation) is ERCOT’s ultimate nightmare. The grid is stronger than it used to be, but we are still very much at risk.
ERCOT believes there’s an 80% chance of rolling outages if temperatures reach the single digits. Enzo didn’t get anywhere close to that. The next storm might.
Texas Is Adding Supply
The Texas electric market is attracting massive investments. We’re installing roughly a gigawatt per month of solar and storage. And the PUC is advancing Texas Energy Fund loans for 9.8 gigawatts of natural gas plants.
The Texas Energy Fund also includes the Texas Backup Power Program. If the state funds it as last session’s Senate Bill 2627 requires, it would add another four gigawatts of distributed solar, storage, and gas in coming years. That would provide more supply on the grid and improve resilience during distribution-side power outages.
The PUC also has recommended that the legislature create a new Nuclear Energy Fund, which would (eventually) provide even more supply.
So Texas is adding a lot of resources on the supply side — more than anywhere else in the country.