The Public Utility Commission in the State of Texas will hold a “Winter Preparedness” workshop this week.
ERCOT is expected to provide testimony on the grid’s reliability as Texas heads into the winter months. This is on the heels of ERCOT's own board meeting earlier this week.
Dr. Daniel Cohan is an Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at Rice University. He said we’re in better shape than we were nearly three years ago when a winter storm devastated much of the state with widespread power outages.
“The vast majority of winters, we will be okay,” he said. Still, he acknowledges the lingering impact.
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“The state has taken a number of steps to make things better than it was then, but we’re still on an isolated grid with many of the same problems that we had in 2021,” Cohan said.
ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said population growth and demand are squeezing the state’s supply.
"We're bursting in terms of demand, economic growth, record heat. I mean, just installed capacity. It's just too many factors in the system,” said Vegas.
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ERCOT leaders recently announced they’re looking to purchase backup power for some 600,000 homes per hour if needed. They hope to have this deal completed by December when the winter cold brings power complications. Cohan said it’s a short-term solution.
“We’re just a couple of months away from the heart of winter, and you can’t build a power plant in that time,” he said. “And you can’t even bring back plants that have been mothballed, that have been out of operation for a long time.”
In the summer, the power grid's most vulnerable time is when Texans return home from work and begin using their appliances, around 7 or 8 p.m. In the winter, the grid will be most vulnerable in the mid-morning when it's still dark outside, and Texans are beginning to wake up to use energy before they go to work.
Solar farms helped carry the state through the brutal summer heat, but for winter demand, it’s not a viable solution.
“It doesn’t help in the dead of winter when it’s dark and cloudy and in those early morning hours when demand peaks and the sun hasn’t come up yet,” Cohan said.
The grid, according to Cohan and ERCOT, is in better shape than it was in 2021, but he says substantial changes are needed over the next several years.
“This is a choice that has been made over decades to operate as an isolated grid, as an island unlike any other state in the continental US, to not have the resiliency that we get by being connected to other states,” he said.
According to an ERCOT analysis, they predict this December, there's a 4.3% chance of a controlled power outage every day around 8 AM. That chance goes up to 14.4% if there are similar conditions to last year's December cold snap.
