Forrest Austin grabs a stack of firewood from the back of a truck as he and Mickey Taylor sell wood along FM 2920 on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024, in Spring.
Thank you to everyone who conserved electricity on Monday and Tuesday and to those who did not; you owe us one.
Winter Storm Heather will not go down in history like 2021’s Winter Storm Uri or 2022’s Winter Storm Elliott, a sign the grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has improved. But Texans need to avoid learning the wrong lessons from this success.
When ERCOT called for Texans to conserve electricity, it blamed cold temperatures and lower-than-normal wind power. But that’s not the whole story; reducing reliance on renewable energy is not the answer.
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The wind in West Texas was unseasonably low, reducing the electricity produced by those turbines. But wind along the Lower Gulf Coast and South Texas blew like the dickens. The problem was not a lack of power but a lack of transmission lines.
A frozen fountain at the San Antonio Zoo on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, in San Antonio.
When wholesale electricity was selling for $300 a megawatt hour across most of the state, it was selling for $20 in Corpus Christi and Brownsville. Transmission is the secret sauce to building a reliable grid that does not overheat the planet with greenhouse gas emissions.
An example of the right move is Pattern Energy’s Southern Spirit transmission line, which is currently hung up by locals in Louisiana. The high-voltage, direct current line would bring nuclear power from the Mississippi to Dallas when needed and allow Texas to export wind and solar when we have extra.
I first wrote about the project in 2017, but it’s only now getting built, demonstrating the need for permitting reform. The lines will carry direct current, which, along with other factors, will allow the Texas grid to remain outside federal regulation while adding backup power.
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A freeze warning sign is placed outside an apartment complex as temperatures dropped below freezing on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, in Conroe.
The oil and natural gas folks argue Texas needs more fossil fuel power plants to avoid another near miss. But that’s a sales pitch by people who want to lock in a 40-year supply contract; there are a half-dozen cheaper ways to guarantee reliability.
Batteries provided 1,200 megawatts of backup power, enough for 240,000 homes, during the Tuesday morning crux after winds died down and the sun was still rising, according to ERCOT. That much power could have prevented the cascading blackouts in the first hours of Winter Storm Uri.
Battery operators, many co-located with wind and solar facilities, plan to more than double ERCOT’s battery capacity by next winter, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. Most emergency conditions on the ERCOT grid only last a few hours. Most batteries are good for at least four.
Producing more power only addresses the supply side. Texas can lower demand, too. Texans used 13% less electricity than ERCOT expected Monday morning and 10% less during Tuesday’s critical 8 a.m. hour.
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Numerous studies show state building codes make Texas homes among the leakiest, costing homeowners hundreds of dollars a year in unnecessary energy bills. Contractors still install cheap furnaces that use electric heat strips and waste energy.
Requiring more insulation and replacing old furnaces could save enough electricity to reduce the need for new power plants. Not only would the upgrades cost less than natural gas power plants, but they would lower consumer electricity bills for a decade or more.
“Implementing these programs from 2024 through 2030 could reduce summer peak loads statewide by about 14,800 megawatts and reduce winter peak loads by about 23,500 megawatts,” an American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy report determined.
If given a choice between spending $18 billion on 10,000 megawatts of polluting natural gas power plants or investing $610 million in 23,500 megawatts of energy efficiency that will reduce bills by $13 a month, the choice should be obvious.
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We will always need natural gas power plants for backup, but that dependence remains the biggest threat. No federal or state entity ensures natural gas reliability in Texas, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission warned, and while the industry was on best behavior for Winter Storm Heather, we remain at the mercy of for-profit corporations that face no consequences when they fail.
The Texas Legislature should ban pipeline operators from owning the natural gas in their pipes and order ERCOT to monitor supply in a publicly transparent way. In return, we need a wholesale market that makes owning backup power plants profitable, even though they should operate only a few hundred hours a year.
Texans weathered this winter blast well, but a storm with ice and snow would have been different. Lawmakers must do more before we can sleep confidently, knowing we won’t wake up freezing.
Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at HoustonChronicle.com/TomlinsonNewsletter or Expressnews.com/TomlinsonNewsletter.
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