The CEO of ERCOT says his main concern for North Texas is managing growth issues. The state’s grid operator says we have enough power. Local leaders in North Texas tell NBC 5’s Phil Prazan getting it to new homes is a constant battle.
The leader of the statewide grid operator and local public officials tell NBC 5 that keeping energy infrastructure at pace with new home construction in North Texas is one of their key challenges.
With 80 people moving to Denton County every day, Judge Andy Eads said the county has to work with cities, utility companies, and regulators to plan for and approve enough transmission power lines.
Friday, the power company for the city of Argyle organized a planned outage so crews could upgrade the system to keep up with the growing demand with consistent 100-degree days.
A spokesperson for Oncor, one of the three main utility companies in Denton County, wrote NBC 5, "Because of the extreme growth in our area, an autotransformer installed a year ago has already reached its maximum capacity. This upgrade will facilitate the installation of two larger autotransformers to meet the current needs while allowing room for expansion."
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Robert White, director of Argyle's Public Works Department told NBC 5, "We need to up-size some things."
A city on the northern end of Denton County had planned for rolling outages over the weekend because too many people were expected to use too much electricity and strain the system.
Staff in the city of Sanger wrote on the city's website, "While this heat is hard on us, it also puts strains on our system. To help reduce some of that strain, the City of Sanger Electric customers may experience rolling power outages."
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After consistently warning people living in Sanger to use less power, staff wrote, "Your efforts to conserve power reduced the strain on our equipment so that we did not have to implement any rolling power outages."
The local utilities and city officials are not the only ones feeling growing pains. County and statewide leaders say keeping the infrastructure at pace with new home construction is a big part of their job.
"New transmission lines are one of the biggest challenges we're facing here in the county as the county. As the county continues to grow we need to expand transmission lines," said Denton County Judge Andy Eads.
Transmission lines are those big, several-story high structures carrying power for miles. Judge Eads says it's a challenge because transmission lines need space and fast-growing homes, businesses, and buildings eat up the space in a growing county.
"You got to have the transmission lines to bring large quantities of power to the new users," said Eads.
Two lines were just approved for construction on the west side of Flower Mound and around Justin - just down the road from Argyle, according to Eads.
"Transmission lines are important because they bring in power from the generating source here to the local provider," said Eads.
Pablo Vegas, the CEO of the state's power grid operator ERCOT, told NBC 5 Monday that his major issue for North Texas is making sure transmission lines and transmission facilities keep up with the growth. Substations turn high-voltage power to low-voltage power so it can be used in homes and businesses.
"That's something we're always modeling and running scenarios around to make sure the transmission facilities are being built and updated in the right locations," said Vegas.
That's getting more difficult to do, Vegas said, with the new "congestion."
