Doubts remain over reliability of Texas power grid

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5289877/texas-power-grid-after-outage

by geox • 1 year ago

66 31 1 year ago

obblekk• 1 year ago

Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas.
"Texas didn't [build solar farms and battery storage] for an energy transition reason at all," says Rhodes, "We just made it easy to build things here. And so people started building things here."

It's hard for me to reconcile the criticism of Texas's market structure with the fact that they seem to add more (clean) generation capacity than any other state.

Is it as simple as: Their state is growing very fast (both people and electricity per person due to datacenters) leading to supply/demand forecasting difficulty and mismatches?

TX generates 138% more electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [1]. By contrast CA generated 5% less electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [2] (roughly same for any 2 years around those start and stop years).

I do wish this topic were treated less politically and more pragmatically. At this point everyone seems to agree we need more electricity in the future with less carbon intensity and so far, TX is one of the few states actually achieving it at scale.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2... [2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/media/7311

philjohn• 1 year ago

Is that CA number because more properties are generating lots of Solar PV and so need less from the grid?

You still have the problem, especially with PV, of the duck curve that requires other producers to ramp down (and potentially be paid for ramping down).

nomel• 1 year ago

As someone in California, part of it is that we have the highest cost electricity in the country. Texas power costs less than 1/3 what I pay.

I, personally, would use much more if it were cheaper (tighter thermostat/AC, charge at home, etc).

Aloha• 1 year ago

The market structure is weird, but it works more or less.

Retric5• 1 year ago

The absolute amount of clean generation mostly just correlates with the amount of electricity demand.

Texas uses 475 TWh / year of electricity, California 251, Florida 248, Ohio 149, and down it goes.

Meanwhile Texas only has 33% carbon free electricity vs 49% in California which are still below outliers like Vermont 80%, South Dakota 81%, and Washington 83%.

Unfortunately, WV and Kentucky are coal country with under 7% carbon free.

noirbot4• 1 year ago

Yea. It's trite, but a lot of things are literally bigger in Texas. It's easy to do really misleading stats around Texas because it just does more of everything than the rest of the US. It can both build more green energy and still pollute more than everyone else.

megaman8212• 1 year ago

Just looking at electricity is unfair though. How much of Vermont's, South Dakota's and Washington's heat come from clean electricity and how much is natural gas? If you want to compare apples-to-apples you have to look at things like residential carbon intensity separately from industry.

hk1337• 1 year ago

Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids.

This may be true but it makes it sound like there's no connections, which is false. There are interconnections between other power grids but depending on their definition of "major connections", it may be technically true.

Johnny555• 1 year ago

This may be true but it makes it sound like there's no connections, which is false

It sounds more like there are no major connections, which is what a plain reading of that sentence says. And as you said, that's true, there's no alternate interpretation where interties that can carry around 1.5% of the grid's load are "major connections".

And you're ignoring the fact that the lack of interconnections is a deliberate political decision, not a technical oddity. By keeping their grid independent, the Texas grid can escape regulation by FERC. The limited interties they do have are used for used for scheduled and emergency power trades and are not treated as interconnections supporting interstate or international trade.

https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/connecting-past-and-...

brightball• 1 year ago

It seems like they just trusted that supply and demand works…and were correct.

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

Except: They had to interfere with the free market to force electric suppliers to harden their infrastructure against cold weather -- something they hadn't done before because of the race to lowest operating costs.

There's also other horror stories from under regulation:

https://www.keranews.org/news/2021-03-08/texas-wont-reduce-1...

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/04/ercot-texas-electric...

1659447091• 1 year ago

they just trusted that supply and demand works…and were correct.

Except when they weren't, like the sibling comment about 2021 winter and all the hoopla over needing to force them to invest in winter proofing; after a winter failure which cause hundreds of deaths due to multiple days long power outages.

And the more current rolling blackouts during the summer that no one is happy about but have little to no recourse for. It's so much fun having to reset digital clocks on appliances every morning. Or, working late and the unexpected joy of having the power grid tell me it's time for bed because the power for the entire neighborhood, including street lights, will be off for the next 3-5 hours. Hope you have good battery powered fans on before you went to bed or enjoy waking up in a humid mess.

tzs• 1 year ago

TX generates 138% more electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [1]. By contrast CA generated 5% less electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [2] (roughly same for any 2 years around those start and stop years).

Isn't some of that because Texas has no major connections to other grids? As your quote from the article points out that means that to meet increasing demand Texas has to build more power generation in Texas.

If California, which is well-connected to other states' grids, needs more electricity they can buy it from other states.

I do wish this topic were treated less politically and more pragmatically. At this point everyone seems to agree we need more electricity in the future with less carbon intensity and so far, TX is one of the few states actually achieving it at scale.

That's good but its not the whole story. You've got to also look at the mix of renewables and non-renewables. Texas is moving in the right direction, but other states are too and many are farther ahead.

In 2022 Texas produced 139 TWh of renewable electricity [1], which is more than any other state--about 50% more than second place (Washington at 88 TWh)

But Texas also was #1 in non-renewable electricity production at 386 TWh. (Second most is Florida at about 240 TWh).

Percent of electricity from renewals is probably a better way to compare states. Of the top 10 electricity producing states California has the highest renewable precentage at 43%. New York and Texas are at 28% and 27%. The rest of the top 10 is a few around 12-13% and the rest in the 3-10% range.

CO2 Mt/TWh is also useful as it can give some idea of how dirty a state's non-renewables are. For example Delaware and Montana emit 505 and 504 Mt/TWh CO2, but Delaware is only using 3% renewable electricity whereas Montana is using 52% renewable. That suggests that Montana's non-renewables are quite a bit dirtier than Delaware's non-renewables.

Texas is 406 Mt/TWh. Combined with their 26% renewables this suggests that their non-renewables produce around 556 Mt/TWh CO2. There is way dirtier out there (Wyoming at almost 1100 and West Virginia at around 960 for example), but of the top 10 electricity producers only Ohio matches it. California is 380 and Florida is 401.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...

thaumasiotes• 1 year ago

Isn't some of that because Texas has no major connections to other grids? As your quote from the article points out that means that to meet increasing demand Texas has to build more power generation in Texas.
If California, which is well-connected to other states' grids, needs more electricity they can buy it from other states.

Well, that's not quite right, in order to meet increasing demand the increased capacity still has to be built somewhere, but it doesn't have to be built in California.

Either that or you could make the other states use less electricity.

a5seo• 1 year ago

Texas only adds more clean generation because it’s way less capital intensive than building a natural gas or coal plant. Those plants require $500M+ minimum and the returns just aren’t that great. My wife is an energy attorney in Texas and handles power purchase and interconnection deals like these all day long.

Solar and wind deals require far less capital, go up faster, and aren’t subject to the supply risk of natural gas or coal.

Texas also has a lot of clean energy thanks to sun and terrain. The Edwards plateau creates some of the best wind generation opportunities in the US.

Texas also attracts energy heavy industries because it has relatively cheap power. Which we’ve learned partly results from not paying anyone to have excess capacity… which is all fun and games until you have winter storm Yuri roll in and your only option is to “shed load” which btw kills some people.

Another aspect of Texas is that we have demand response contracts whereby certain users get paid simply for the ability to “take” power when required. This is very attractive to bitcoin miners. Prices here go negative from time to time which is pretty wild.

All of this attracts a lot of energy-intensive industries to Texas.

azlev• 1 year ago

First a link about Texas building renewables and batteries to it's system.

Now this point and there is a third link about power shortages in USA.

Just wondering if it would be good to group all links about a topic. I know that there is no such feature here.

ab_testing• 1 year ago

I think one also needs to consider the cost differences between Texas and California power for consumers. Residential power in California is up to 40 cents per KWh ( one of the highest in th3 country) compared to about 18 cents per KWH in Texas. If somebody lives in Texas , it would be nicer to have cheaper power and invest in a generator that might be used one week in a year due to winter storms .

eeixlk• 1 year ago

Understanding texas - it's not political, they just worship money. So if you can make money making solar / wind farms nobody will stop you, and that's why texas has a ton of solar / wind farms. If you can make money running a bitcoin farm and then get paid money to turn it off during peak hours, nobody will stop you. If you can invent a power billing company that is market based so customers save money when rates are low but suddenly have an insane energy bill when ERCOT breaks down nobody will stop you. There is no moral code stopping green energy, it's just pure free market vampire capitalism.

hackeraccount• 1 year ago

Don't sugar coat it, there must be problems with Texas too.

Doubts remain over reliability of Texas power grid

Related Stories