Now, with summer heat bearing down and the threat of blackouts looming, the state’s grid has become a centerpiece of Texas’s gubernatorial race between Gov. Greg Abbott and Beto O’Rourke, where the Democratic hopeful is bashing the incumbent Republican for being unable to guarantee sufficient power supply.
Daily on Energy: Texas grid at center of debate as heat wave strikes
July 18, 2022 | Texas
PRESSURE ON TEXAS GRID: Winter Storm Uri put unprecedented stress on Texas’s power sector last February, leading to skyrocketing power prices, outages and 246 deaths. Ever since, more and more eyes have been focused on the state’s vast power network, most of which is overseen by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
More broadly, ERCOT is a proxy in the debate over reliability and how operators should organize their grids — especially how much their generation mix should involve renewables.
The latest: ERCOT issued its first “conservation appeal” of the season last week in the face of triple-digit heat, asking residential and commercial customers to delay use of appliances and turn up the temperature setting on their AC for a six-hour period because of tight reserve margins.
ERCOT’s request was based on forecasts that its dispatchable generation sources would perform at 85% of installed capacity at the tightest hour, while solar was forecast to be available at 81% of capacity. Wind generation, meanwhile, was forecast to perform at around 8%.
Wind’s merits: The conservation appeal renewed debate over the degree to which low output from ERCOT’s 35,162 MW of installed wind capacity is responsible for the reliability issues.
Jason Isaac, director of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Life:Powered initiative, said after the conservation appeal that the state’s problem is its market “encourages dependence on federally subsidized variable, intermittent, and unreliable sources of energy” like wind and solar that can generate “only a small fraction of the energy Texans need at critical times.”… (Excerpt from The Washington Examiner)
