A power grid system serving nearly 30 million Americans could again approach failure this summer, a local utility executive told the San Antonio Express-News. [emphasis, links added]
Rudy Garza, CEO of the San Antonio-owned utility company CPS Energy, anticipates that Texans will elevate power demand on the state’s grid system above and beyond last year’s record numbers, according to the Express-News.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s power system manager, had to issue several energy rationing alerts last summer as the state’s grid nearly faltered, and those conservation appeals are likely to be made again throughout this summer.
“I have learned in this business that it’s hard to make guarantees on anything,” Garza told the outlet. “If we lose a big nuclear unit, for instance, in the middle of a peak season, that could be enough to throw the grid off into some level of emergency. All we can do is prepare and keep our plants going.”
Garza predicts that Texans will exceed 100,000 megawatts of demand this summer, a level of power use that would be more than 15,000 megawatts greater than last summer’s record-setting demand, according to the Express-News.
Major factors driving demand in Texas include a growing population, a hot economy, cryptocurrency mining operations, and new power-hungry data centers.
“We’re building houses in every direction,” Garza told the Express-News. “We’ve seen an influx of some really large users coming into Texas, but they’re not driving the entirety of it. The state just continues to grow.”
Texas produces the most energy from wind and solar of any state in the country, according to Texas Monthly.
This leaves the ERCOT grid vulnerable to supply shortfalls in specific circumstances, especially the late afternoon and early evening hours of hot summer days with little or no wind blowing, according to the Express-News.
In those circumstances, power generation tails off right when Texans are driving up demand by cranking up their air conditioners and other appliances to stay cool in their homes, according to the Express-News.
To compensate for lost wind capacity in those situations, operators turn to older coal- and natural-gas-fired generation facilities to avoid blackouts.
A similar situation played out in the summer of 2023 when a prolonged heat wave pushed the grid to the brink and prompted ERCOT — which oversees the flow of power to approximately 27 million customers — to briefly issue an emergency notice on Sept. 6, according to the Express-News.
ERCOT put out a record [total] of 11 conservation appeals last summer, and the North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC) — an organization that monitors grid conditions in the U.S. — flagged ERCOT in a recently published outlook report for facing “elevated” blackout risks this summer if weather conditions are stronger than normal.
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Not only are there issues with wind speeds dropping but early evening when it is still quite hot the output from the solar panels start dropping quickly going to zero when the sun is down. And yet the temps are still very hot so something needs to make up for that shortfall and quickly.
It’s hard to believe that a state as red as Texas would go down such a disastrous path. And it’s made worse by the fact that Texas electric grid isn’t connected to either the grids to the east or the west so they are their own island.
Regarding the drama in Feb 2021, there was a lot of finger-pointing after the event and wind enthusiasts blamed gas for failing.
Is it true that one of the problems with the gas supply was the installation of RE-driven pumps in the system on instruction from the EPA and that shut down gas, as much as the need to winterize to northern standards?
I expected much better than this from Texas. Come Greg Abbott, and you get into this and fix it??
The population of Texas is growing, much of it economic refugees. Why isn’t Canada swamped with Global Boiling refugees?
Because there is no Global Boiling and Canada’s economy is a socialist wreck. The Big Lie needs to die at the hand of the electorate. Soon.
Put the UN(Useless Nations) and Washington D.C.(District of Crooks)on Wind and Solar Power Only and make them have to put up with Blackouts
There are lots of warnings about coming blackouts due to actions taken by the liberals. We need these blackouts to become common place for the public to start changing its voting habits.