More Headlines about Texas Record Demand

I was considering editing my post on The Neutron Economy, but since this is fairly scattered information I'll just not and put a little more information here, again, just kind of a smattering of things, but I want to put it here so I have it organized for the future.

There are more sources for "headlines" that I was overlooking when making my previous post. For a balanced view, see a more recent Today in Energy from the EIA. As well as a day-ahead price graph that shows a shocking spike. This scale goes up to $3 / kWh. Yes, this is 30 times more than the typical 10 cents / kWh that we often talk about.


It would appear that I had picked the more moderate out of the AWEA posts. In a previous post they write As Texas utility system is stressed, wind power shows up on schedule. Here is my favorite part.

American Wind Energy Association Manager of Transmission Policy Michael Goggin commented, "Like the Texas blackouts in February in which cold weather caused around 80 mostly fossil-fired power plants to shut down unexpectedly, this episode illustrates how common forced outages are at conventional plants, and drives home the point that no power plant is available 100% of the time. And, unlike wind energy, which ramps down gradually over a sustained period of time and is predictable, conventional power plants fail instantaneously. Wind energy is a valuable tool to diversify our portfolio of energy resources and make it more reliable. Wind plants are keeping the lights on and the air conditioners running for hundreds of thousands of homes in Texas."

I feel a potential blame game that can start from this. Well, my prediction is that every future record demand will spark a similar cycle of headlines. Reuters writes INSIGHT-Heatwave pushes Texas power grid into red zone. Here is the paragraph to read.

Though ERCOT has done a good job balancing supply and demand, "You always have to expect the unexpected can happen,"said Arshad Mansoor, senior vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute. "A unit can shut. The wind may not blow."

You can find more headlines out there, some get quite creative. I mused at ERCOT: Wind power saves Texas from black-outs - so far. Wind power seems to be both dooming and saving the grid at the same time.

There are also some good numbers out there you can find. The wind fleet is about 10 GW nameplate in total, and the record generation was in June this year near that number. The peak power demand was 68 GW and ERCOT has 73 GW of all units put together. Now, if that number is counting all 10 GW from wind and it's producing 2 GW, that means you're balancing 63 GW of dispatchable or baseload units with 2 GW of wind to meet 68 GW of demand. That doesn't make sense obviously. Not to mention that Reuters notes that 4-5 GW was unavailable. Oh well, I'm not going to go digging into ERCOT data right now, but there are several possible explanations for why they are reporting these numbers.

Bonus! Youtube video about it.