Pablo Vegas, president and CEO of ERCOT, discussed ERCOT's power demand forecasts and its plans to address them at a board meeting Tuesday.
A pumpjack is obscured by the heat as it operates on dry farmland with large windmills near Midland. The Texas grid was the envy of the world until 2021. ERCOT added solar and wind while keeping prices low, and geothermal and nuclear show amazing promise. Texans know how to build transmission lines and make them more efficient.
ERCOT remains challenged by rapidly-growing electricity demand as more people and businesses move to Texas.
The Blue Jay solar and storage plant in Iola. Solar panels supplied more electricity than coal-fired power plants to the power grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas for the first month ever March 2024.
Delivering reliable, affordable and sustainable electricity wouldn’t be difficult if officials in Austin and Washington worked together. The challenges are not technological or economic; they are about setting priorities.
Pablo Vegas, chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, promised a new approach to grid planning on Tuesday, promising to better track the growing demand for power from industry.
“We need to accelerate aspects of our planning processes and be able to look further into the future, anticipate what’s coming, because it still takes three to six years to build transmission,” Vegas said.
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The Legislature ordered ERCOT to start considering long-term proposals to add load to the grid rather than relying only on finalized plans. The new approach makes demand forecasts look much, much larger but also less reliable because not all proposed projects come to fruition.
President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is offering Texans billions of dollars to fortify the electric grid, reduce electricity bills and cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the administration promised to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission lines.
The Environmental Protection Agency also gave $249.7 million to the Texas Solar For All Coalition and $156.1 million to the Clean Energy Fund of Texas this week to provide solar energy equipment to low-income communities.
The EPA has also granted $104 million in federal funds to 19 Texas school districts to purchase 288 electric school buses. The EPA grants are part of the $16 billion the federal government has committed to clean energy projects in Texas that have created 23,000 jobs.
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The money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Texas Republicans vehemently opposed. The massive investment in energy and manufacturing is intended to grow the economy while fighting climate change.
Past investments led Waaree Energies to invest $1 billion in a solar panel manufacturing facility near Houston, creating 1,500 jobs. San Antonio has committed $30 million to build, with federal help, the largest municipal onsite solar project in Texas. Diligence Offshore Services announced in August it would invest $1.23 billion to open an offshore wind support and manufacturing facility off the coast of Port Arthur.
Climate change, though, is still missing from Vegas’ and ERCOT’s lexicon. He’s happy to talk about the growing electricity demand from artificial intelligence and fossil fuel facilities but never mentions the residential demand during climate change-driven extreme weather. That’s what causes record-setting peaks that can trigger outages.
Nationwide, weather caused 80% of the power outages since 2000, and the frequency of blackouts has doubled in the past decade, according to data collated by research nonprofit Climate Central. Texas experienced the most weather-related outages, and the pace is accelerating.
Improving the grid to meet growing industrial electricity demand is quite different from building a system that can withstand a changing climate. Adding more power generation and transmission lines is not enough when facing stronger hurricanes, larger wildfires, colder winter storms and hotter summers.
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ERCOT’s planning will remain flawed until officials start preparing for more polar vortexes like 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, rain events like Hurricane Harvey and heat waves like last summer’s.
Transitioning to clean energy and building resilient generation plants and transmission lines offer huge economic opportunities. BlackRock, the world’s largest financial manager, says the world spent $1.8 trillion on the energy transition in 2023 but will need to spend $4 trillion annually by the mid-2030s.
Vegas never mentions climate change because the Republican elected officials who oversee him call it a hoax. Texas will never chart a strong economic course until we have a governor, lieutenant governor and speaker who recognize the greatest threat yet to human prosperity.
The ERCOT boss was correct when he said, “We are the best market in the country to react to that kind of growth. We have the ability in ERCOT to connect dispatchable resources faster than any place else in the country. Batteries, I believe, are going to respond and start to fill in a lot of that.”
The Texas grid was the envy of the world until 2021. ERCOT added solar and wind while keeping prices low, and geothermal and nuclear show amazing promise. Texans know how to build transmission lines and make them more efficient. We even know how to distribute energy sources and reduce demand in a pinch.
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Austin and Washington could work together. However, that requires a political class not beholden to donors who operate the climate-destroying equipment of the past and Texans ready to lead the fight against climate change with the technology of tomorrow.
Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at houstonhchronicle.com/tomlinsonnewsletter or expressnews.com/tomlinsonnewsletter.
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