Texas Grid Likely to be in Emergency Condition Tonight.

WMno57

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/ercot-grid-emergency-power-18328778.php
There is a “high likelihood” the state's power grid will be operating under emergency conditions Thursday, Electric Reliability Council of Texas CEO Pablo Vegas told the Public Utilities Commission at its morning meeting. It would be the first time since Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 that the grid entered emergency conditions.
Electricity demand is forecast to exceed committed supply Thursday from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., according to preliminary data from the grid operator late Thursday morning. The gap between supply and demand will be “more tight than any other day” this summer, Vegas told commissioners.
The expected tight conditions come due to very high heat, very high demand and the low expected output of wind power in the late afternoon as solar resources ramp down with sunset, Vegas said.
Natural gas and coal plants, which can underperform or fail in high heat, are seeing “at or near normal forced outage levels,” Vegas said. Grid data showed approximately 6,800 megawatts of natural gas and coal outages as of 11:30 a.m. Going into the summer, ERCOT predicted that natural gas and coal plants would see “typical” outages of 5,034 megawatts.
Shortly before noon, ERCOT issued a conservation request for 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. — the fourth such request of the summer — a non-emergency notice to the public that asks all Texans to conserve energy use. The state's grid operator manages 90 percent of the Texas electricity grid and acts as both traffic control for the flow of electricity across the state and as the trading floor for the wholesale electricity market.
To conserve power, the grid operator suggested residents set their thermostats a degree or two higher, avoid using large appliances such as washers or dryers, turn off and unplug non-essential lights and appliances and turn off pool pumps. Businesses can turn off lights and equipment in spaces that are not in use and turn off air-conditioning outside of business hours. ERCOT also requested that all government agencies implement all programs to reduce energy use at their facilities.
Reliant, a retail electricity provider that sells electricity to consumers, asked its customers to conserve Thursday through Monday from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. in an email to customers Wednesday night. Reliant cited the extreme heat Texas is currently experiencing, which prompts consumers to blast the air-conditioning to stay cool, thus driving up energy demand. CenterPoint, Houston's natural gas provider and transmission and distribution company, also sent an email to its customers Thursday boosting ERCOT's conservation request.
If the grid operator decides to initiate emergency operations, it would deploy a series of tools to try to reduce demand and call upon other available sources of supply.
ERCOT has three levels of emergency operations, based on how many megawatts are left in operating reserves, the grid’s backup stores of electricity. One megawatt of electricity can power about 200 Texas homes during periods of peak demand, according to ERCOT.
The first level is initiated when operating reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts and are not expected to recover within 30 minutes. Under level one, the grid operator would bring online all available electricity generation, release any unused reserves and import up to 1,220 megawatts of electricity from neighboring electric grids. ERCOT has far fewer connections to neighboring grids than other U.S. power grids.
Level two is initiated when operating reserves drop below 1,750 megawatts and are not expected to recover within 30 minutes. Under level two, the grid operator would continue to pay large industrial customers to reduce power use and try to reduce electricity use from transmission companies.
Level three, the highest level of emergency, is initiated when operating reserves drop below 1,430 megawatts. If reserves drop even further to below 1,000 megawatts and are not expected to recover within 30 minutes, as a last resort, ERCOT will order rolling outages. ERCOT projections around noon Thursday show demand exceeding supply in the early evening.
Rolling outages are supposed to be outages staggered among different areas to reduce demand and prevent further, potentially weeks-long damage to the power grid. The grid operator has not reached any level of emergency since February 2021, when what were supposed to be rotating outages cascaded into outages that lasted for days in the infamous Texas winter freeze.
So far this summer, ERCOT has asked for conservation four times – most recently twice last week – but has not yet initiated emergency operations.
Texas has seen an unprecedented summer for the power grid, with Texans setting 10 records for electricity demand since the end of June amid a persistent heat wave and sustained population growth.
The current record stands at 85,435 megawatts set two weeks ago, shattering the record of 80,038 megawatts going into the summer set in 2022. As of 11:30 a.m., Thursday’s demand is expected to peak at 84,928 megawatts at 5 p.m.

WMno57

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

WMno57

Last night at 8:00 PM they put one Gigawatt of battery power onto the grid.

WMno57

They dodged a bullet! In 8 hours they were able to bring online 3 GW of Coal, 10 GW of Gas, and 1 GW of Battery. That was exciting to watch. They really need more baseline power before winter.

Hot_water_fan

Tomorrow looks like a busy day too. Not sure what baseload power is or why it’s allegedly important. 

WMno57

Maybe baseline or baseload is the wrong term for it. I'm talking about a power source that can be counted on to deliver when you need it. The opposite of wind and solar. Like the coal plants we keep closing. Or the nuclear plant my son works at.
It's important on cold winter days with little sun and wind. It becomes more important in higher latitudes where the winter days are very short and many times also cloudy.

Hot_water_fan

@WMno57 that’s more like it. People say baseload when they really mean reliable. We all want that. Who cares if it is “baseload”

fentonc

@WMno57 - the term for that is 'dispatchable' power. "Baseload" usually refers to the fact that power consumption has a predictable minimum throughout the day, so you can run a plant 24x7 and not need to cycle it up/down to meet that power output. A nuclear plant can't really modulate its power output, for instance (nor can coal plants easily do so). Plants that can easily change their output are 'load following' plants - gas and hydro plants, or a battery, for example.

Having only power plants that can't readily ramp up/down would be pretty expensive and inefficient. The nice thing about solar and wind is that their marginal cost to produce a megawatt-hour is basically zero, and they're reasonably predictable even if they're not dispatchable. Most grids try to prioritize by lowest cost per megawatt-hour of available plants to produce the lowest total cost, so if you've got wind and solar power coming in, you want to use it, and if you're desperate for any power you can get you might fire up really inefficient 'peaking' gas turbines or oil plants that barely ever operate. A lot of solar/wind plants are being built with batteries now to make a kind of hybrid dispatchable plant.

Coal plants keep closing because the economics are pretty bad compared to solar/wind with their zero marginal cost power and gas which is dispatchable, cheap and has much better load following characteristics. It's always a balancing act between reliability and cost, but most people would rather have cheaper year-round utility bills and occasionally be asked to turn their thermostats up/down. In 2022, total generation for Texas was:

• 54% gas
  
• 13% coal
  
• 6.6% nuclear
  
• 26% solar/wind/hydro
  

In another 10 years, coal will probably be gone completely and it will just be gas and wind/solar + batteries (plus a handful of nuclear plants).

ethicalpaul

WMno57 said:

Maybe baseline or baseload is the wrong term for it. I'm talking about a power source that can be counted on to deliver when you need it. The opposite of wind and solar. Like the coal plants we keep closing. Or the nuclear plant my son works at.

And yet, from the article you quoted:

Natural gas and coal plants, which can underperform or fail in high heat

Hot_water_fan

Great summary @fentonc. 

Seems like nuclear + battery (I guess pumped storage was the original battery) would be a great asset. New nuclear just needs to get its costs reasonable, or carve out a premium price position. 

fentonc

@Hot_water_fan I've seen proposals to do 'thermal batteries' with nuclear to provide them with some peaking/load shifting capacity, as well as proposals to generate hydrogen on-site. As soon as you have an actual battery, I don't think there is much advantage to co-locating it with the nuclear plant (if that's what you were suggesting), unless there is some kind of transmission infrastructure advantage.

Even when there is local enthusiasm for it, nuclear just takes so long to build and it's so expensive, it's hard to see many places willing to make big, long-term investments in it. Gas, wind, solar and batteries just have such low costs and short timelines, they're pushing everything else out.

WMno57

@ethicalpaul , I noticed that in the article. I tried to find more information about that and found one vague reference to recent thermal plant failures in Texas. I doubt it. I think it more likely that some coal and gas plants were told "Go off line now and do any preventative maintenance necessary, because we need your best effort when the sun goes down tonight at 8:00 PM". The graphs of Thursday's power source by time support my theory.
Solar under performs at twilight and then fails every night. Doesn't Solar (photovoltic) also under perform at higher temperatures?

Hot_water_fan

Thermal plants fail during high temperatures, too. In addition, the ones still running operate at lower efficiency as it gets hotter, so output falls. PV doesn't work when the sun doesn't shine, but gas doesn't work when it shines too much essentially .

mattmia2

If only there were a system to buy excess capacity from other states that have less demand...

WMno57

Its funny you bring that up. The top news story all day today on both Google and DuckDuckGo search engines is this from Katherine Fung at Newsweek. MSN is heavily promoting it as well.
https://www.newsweek.com/greg-abbott-outrage-ercot-rolling-blackouts-texas-1822470
Ms Fung writes:
"Avoiding the reach of federal regulators, Texas has long operated on a lone grid that is separated from the rest of the country. Although the state has been able to remain exempt from federal rules, its power grid has run into issues being disconnected from the nation's other grids, meaning Texas cannot access power from other states, even in times of emergency."
Unfortunately for Ms Fung and Newsweek, that's not true.
Texas does in fact have ties to other states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection#Ties
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/dctieflows
The rest of the article contains little about electricity, but multiple quotes from other people who have an axe to grind with Texas Governor Greg Abbott. There are no quotes from people in the power industry, or the majority of Texas voters who chose Greg Abbott to be their Governor. I'm not going to tell you it's a biased article, anyone who can read at a middle school reading level should be able to figure that out for themselves. If someone can't figure that out, I can't help them.
Who is Kathering Fung?
https://www.newsweek.com/authors/katherine-fung
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek reporter based in New York City. Her focus is reporting on U.S. and world politics. She has covered the Republican primary elections and the American education system extensively. Katherine joined Newsweek in 2020 and had previously worked at Good Housekeeping and Marie Claire. She is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and obtained her Master's degree from New York University.
What was that salsa commercial a few years ago where people from Texas were making fun of New York City?

Hot_water_fan

ERCOT is connected to Mexico and the rest of the US. Those connections total 1.2GW I believe. Their peak yesterday was 85GW. I think that’s functionally the same as not being connected, no need to attack some random reporter. 

ratio

Broadcast media is pop entertainment. Besides, everyone knows the solution is heat pumps.

WMno57

Level Two Emergency Last Night.
This article explains why.
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/energy/2023/09/07/texas-power-emergency-hinged-on-stranded-wind-farm-supplies/

jumper

If I was younger and believed that I'd stay in same house for next twenty years; then I'd consider going off grid. These measures to keep grid going will have to eventually be paid by consumers.

ChrisJ

jumper said:

If I was younger and believed that I'd stay in same house for next twenty years; then I'd consider going off grid. These measures to keep grid going will have to eventually be paid by consumers.

Isn't that how everything works? Literally everything?

Who should pay for it?

WMno57

Off Grid has become more affordable because of developments and lowered costs with Wind and Solar. Still more expensive per Kwh than on-grid, but cheaper now than 20 years ago. If your livelihood supports living in the middle of nowhere, land is a lot cheaper.
We have another thread going here about a steam boiler in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Many off grid properties in the U.P. This one belongs to Sam Wiltzius, who has an excellent blog where he discusses his off-grid systems.
https://offgridcabin.wordpress.com/
The Wiltzius Camp (that's Yooper for cabin) is 4 miles from the nearest electric. They heat their camp with wood and propane, and have a battery bank for electric. The battery bank is maintained by solar and a small generator.

HomerJSmith

Ya, Texas should get their alt energy situation down pat by the year 2096. Good luck with that.