Tag Archives: winterize

Texas Moves to Make Generators Winterize, Bar Future Griddys

At-a-Glance:

The Texas Senate passed a sweeping bill to overhaul the state’s electricity market following February’s historic blackouts by forcing power plants to winterize and barring the type of business model used by Griddy Energy. To learn more, read “Texas Moves to Make Generators Winterize, Bar Future Griddys.” Reading this article may require a subscription from the news outlet.

Key Takeaways:

  • The measure, which still needs approval by the state’s House of Representatives, would require the owners of all power generators, transmission lines, natural gas facilities and pipelines to protect their facilities against extreme weather or face a penalty of up to $1 million a day.
  • On March 30, the Texas house preliminarily approved its own package of bills designed to respond to the grid failure. They include a measure that would only require power plants and power line owners to weatherize.
  • Both House and Senate measures would ban power providers from offering electricity plans tied to the state’s volatile wholesale power market, a practice that resulted in exorbitant bills for customers during the energy crisis.
  • The Senate bill would change the way that electricity is priced during an emergency to protect utilities from sky-high bills and require renewable energy sources to have backup plans to provide power at critical periods by purchasing so-called ancillary services.

Path to 100% Perspective:

The Texas blackouts are an urgent indication that recommendations should be turned into common-sense regulation that leads to grid reliability and ratepayer protection. Regulators and system planners analyze energy use based on one event in ten years. The current planning process does not account for extreme weather conditions that happen once in a hundred years, such as the system that moved through Texas in February. As climate change progresses, such events are forecasted to become more frequent, and should be considered during planning.


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Texas Blackout Hearings Highlight Intertwined Risks of Natural Gas, Power Grid and Deregulated Market

At-a-Glance:

The catastrophic breakdown of Texas’ natural gas and electric system the week of February 15 lacks a single villain to blame for it all. Instead, the widespread constraints in natural-gas supply and the shutdown of core power plant capacity that left millions without power can be chalked up to cascading failures between two interdependent systems – and any solutions will need to take these interdependencies into account to avert a similar crisis in the future. To learn more, read “Texas Blackout Hearings Highlight Intertwined Risks of Natural Gas, Power Grid and Deregulated Market.”

Key Takeaways:

  • In a hearing held on February 25, power company executives pointed to natural-gas shortages for forcing more than half of the state’s winter peaking generation fleet to shut down. That loss of generation capacity forced state grid operator ERCOT to institute rolling blackouts to prevent a broader grid collapse.
  • The hearing saw disputes over whether failure to winterize the state’s natural-gas infrastructure was primarily to blame for the shortages, as opposed to a surge in demand for the fuel for both power generation and heating.
  • Underlying these technical failures are questions about the role of the state’s deregulated energy market structure.
    • ERCOT is the only major grid that operates outside the federal regulatory authority that sets maximum market prices.
    • For two decades, Texas’ energy markets have lacked the capacity and resource-adequacy constructs that other states and grid operators use to secure resources to cover rare but potentially disastrous imbalances between electricity supply and demand.
    • Instead, Texas relies on scarcity pricing of up to $9,000 per megawatt-hour during times of peak grid stress to incentive power plant owners to invest in resources to cover those emergencies.

Path to 100% Perspective:

In both Texas and California, the widespread blackouts reveal the need for updated policy, improved planning as well as technological and chronological power system expansion along with adequate modeling. Updated policy means including these renewable fuels and the plants that use them to count towards clean energy goals. As many believe climate change will make extreme weather events more common and even more unpredictable, state policymakers and regulators need to act now to decarbonize the electricity sector.

 

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Texas Power Crisis Moves Into Fourth Day With Millions in Dark

At-a-Glance:

Economic fallout from the extreme winter weather that caused widespread blackouts is continuing to have a ripple effect even as power is restored. “The current energy crisis is much bigger than most people realize. This is a global crisis,” Paul Sankey, an oil analyst at Sankey Research, wrote in a note. “The largest energy outage in U.S. history.” To learn more, read “Texas Power Crisis Moves Into Fourth Day With Millions in Dark.” Reading this article may require a subscription.

Key Takeaways:

  • While Texas’s grid operator was able to restore power to 1.8 million homes by Wednesday February 17, 1.2 million homes remained without electricity.
  • Generation capacity on the grid reached 52 gigawatts Wednesday evening, the highest level since Monday morning. Electricity load climbed to 49 gigawatts, indicating that power had been restored to some customers.
  • As of February 17, 43 gigawatts of the state’s generation capacity remained offline, including 26.5 gigawatts of thermal generation that shut due to frozen instruments, limited gas supplies, and low gas pressure.
  • Frozen turbines and icy solar panels shut down nearly 17 gigawatts of renewable energy.
  • Gas production has plummeted to the lowest level since 2017.

Path to 100% Perspective:

The recent Texas power crisis impacted millions of people in Texas and neighboring states. One reason these blackouts occurred is that many power plants are not designed to handle extreme ambient temperatures. Limited natural gas supply and low gas pressure also posed a challenge for power plants across the state. Winterizing gas supply and power plants is a must to avoid similar situations in the future. Although it is more expensive to winterize the gas supply and power plants, this is required to ensure reliability when extreme weather occurs.

 

 

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Texas Storms, California Heat Waves and ‘Vulnerable’ Utilities

At-a-Glance:

In California, wildfires and heat waves in recent years forced utilities to shut off power to millions of homes and businesses. Now, Texas is learning that deadly winter storms and intense cold can do the same. To learn more, read “Texas Storms, California Heat Waves and ‘Vulnerable’ Utilities.” Reading this article may require a subscription.

Key Takeaways:

  • Blackouts in Texas and California have revealed that power plants can be strained and knocked offline by the kind of extreme cold and hot weather that climate scientists have said will become more common as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.
  • The electricity industry typically looks at average annual temperatures rather than seasonal ones. Changing the distribution of power sources based on the seasonal temperatures could help avoid electricity shortages.
  • The Electric Reliability Council of Texas could take a cue from states in colder climates and winterize its power plants and other equipment to prevent future weather-related power failures.
  • That Texas and California have been hardest hit makes clear that simplistic ideological explanations are often wrong. Texas, for example, has relied on market forces to balance its electric grid.

Path to 100% Perspective:

The impacts of climate change and extreme weather are not limited to Texas and California. All states can take steps to ensure their power and natural gas systems can handle the full range of temperatures that climate analysts forecast; winterization is just one example. States should also explore long-term energy storage solutions, such as thermal generation.

 

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