Texas Grid Problems and Possible Solutions and how to prepare Massachusetts
There are many newspaper reports on this topic that are cherry picking facts and it has devolved into another partisan fight.
Cold weather is not uncommon in TX and ineffective Politicians are common everywhere: This is the 9th time since 1950 that Dallas has had more than 4 inches of snow and this is the first time that the grid has failed. In 2005, within Texas’ energy generation capacity, renewables were a miniscule proportion and today it is 30% — Wind is 25% and Solar is 4% and others is 1%. I want to be crystal clear that there was no mandate from the federal government that made Texas embrace wind power to such an extent. The Texas politicians simply fell in love with the green subsidies and constantly pushed the Federal government to renew the wind turbine tax credits every few years. So for the Texas politicians to blame Obama or AOC or the Green New Deal is not accurate. Just like these Texas politicians blamed the California politicians for brownouts there over the summer, they can blame themselves for this winter’s power grid challenges in Texas.
Texas Grid can easily manage normal winter demand despite unreliable Wind generation: Normally the winter demand is 40–45 GW and on a monthly basis, it is met with natural gas at 50%, renewables at 23% (mainly wind), coal at 18%, nuclear and others at 9%. According to the WSJ, this year, Texas had a total winter capacity of 83 GW from all power sources. But within that 83 GW is 30 GW of wind capacity. In January, before all this became an issue, on any given day, wind was producing anywhere between 1 GW to 20 GW. so wind can contribute 2% of that day’s electricity needs or 45% of that day’s electricity needs. Hence the monthly average of 23%. Even in the best of circumstances, it is not reliable. So for calculation purposes, as being available to generate, Texas grid only includes 3 GW from wind. That is just 10% of the rated capacity. Despite having 83 GW of rated capacity this month, Texas grid could reliably only produce 56 GW of electricity — 53 GW from non-renewables like natural gas, coal, and nuclear and only 3 GW from renewables. Even given the inherent unreliability of wind, the 56 GW of baseline energy could easily meet the normal winter demand of 40–45 GW.
Texas Grid did not plan for repeat of peak winter demand: During times of stress, such as this week, demand peaked at 69 GW. The previous peak was 67 GW, so such demand peaks do happen. Leading into the weekend (Feb. 13th and 14th), natural gas delivered 40 GW instead of the usual 20–25 GW and coal and nuclear delivered 15 GW, instead of the usual 8–10 GW. Wind was 0 GW. Bottom-line is nonrenewable sources of energy were supposed to contribute 53 GW and they contributed 55 GW. Wind was mostly offline and contributed very little. Obviously that was less than the demand of 69 GW. As a result, rolling blackouts started.
Natural gas storage was less and the infrastructure was not winterized: Come Monday (Feb. 15th) onwards, temperatures fell close to 0 F and natural gas supply became a challenge and natural gas plants started going offline. At this point, we can talk about lack of winterization at both the natural gas storage facilities and at the power generation facilities. Also the shortage of natural gas storage capacity meant the diversion of stored natural gas for home heating instead of electricity generation. As natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants faced issues, the energy generation fell to 45 GW by Monday afternoon. Compared to the previous day, a reduction of 10 GW and well below the demand of 69 GW. As a result, the blackouts intensified and stopped being “rolling”.
Texas Summer generation is also barely meeting demand: In the winter, 10% of wind capacity is considered as available. In the summer, 15% of the wind and solar capacity is considered as available. On August 19th, 2019, Texas grid experienced the highest demand of 74.7 GW. The reliable sources of energy — natural gas, coal, and nuclear delivered 108% of their available capacity — 64.5 GW out of the rated capacity of 59.6 GW. Unlike in the recent crisis, renewable delivered at 26% of their generation capacity — 8.8 GW out of the rated capacity of 34 GW. Even then there was a shortfall of 1.4 GW, which is about 2% and could be managed by small blackouts of an hour or so. Clearly both in the summer and in the winter, Texas grid doesn’t have the necessary capacity of reliable sources of energy to meet peak demand.
Bad planning causes misery everywhere: Obviously the Texas grid was not planning for a 69 GW demand during this winter and that is strange because in the past, they have seen demand spike to 67 GW. They did not have reliable sources of generation capacity in case of a demand spike. They simply invested too much in the unreliable wind and solar sources of electricity. Despite a prior freeze in 2011, their equipment was not sufficiently winterized. As a result, vast portions of the state does not have electricity, does not have clean water, home pipes have burst, and worst of all, farm animals have suffered immensely.
Solutions:
A. Always ensure reliable sources of Energy can meet Peak Demand and cap renewable capacity at 15% of peak demand: What I am saying at this point is if I can count on only 10% or 15% of my renewables capacity to be available in my base load, we should not allow renewables to cross 15% of the peak demand. That means if peak TX demand is 75 GW, all renewables should be capped at 15% of that, which is at 12 GW. So within the winter rated capacity of 83 GW, renewables would only be 12 GW and reliable sources of energy would be 71 GW, and that means the grid could support 69 GW of peak demand based on reliable sources of energy. All the federal mandates that say 30% of the electricity should come from renewable sources of energy make the core grid unreliable. On normal days, 12 GW of wind capacity would have met 10–20% of Texas electricity requirements while preserving the more reliable sources of energy to meet peak demand. The goal as usual is “Hope for the best but Plan for the worst.”
B. Invest in Energy storage versus creating more renewable capacity: The current policy is to keep adding renewable capacity. Since we can only rely on 15% of the renewal capacity, we are creating a large duplicate infrastructure. The renewable capacity in Texas has already gone from 0 GW in 2005 to 34 GW of in 2020. That’s a $50 Bn investment that will give us 5 GW when we really need it. Instead of taking this 34 GW to 50 GW in the future, we should instead divert those incremental dollars into energy storage solutions. If we can store 10 GW of electricity for those peak days, it will be a game changer. Our Electricity grid will become more reliable and our grid management can move away from planning for peak loads.
C. Stress test equipment: Winterization is needed and they should do that with the focus on reliability. I read somewhere that TX followed one regulation which did not help them and did not follow another regulation that would have helped them. This is the problem of having an independent grid that can pick and chose which regulation to follow and usually that results in a mess.
D. Create 30 days of natural gas reserve: Regulations require nuclear plants to have 2 years of supply and coal plants to have 3 months of supply but natural gas seems to be on tap. We need to have adequate storage of natural gas of at least 30 days of peak demand. This is a critical resource and we should have it in adequate supply. Texas having energy shortages is akin to dying of starvation in a fully stocked grocery store. Only incompetence can result in that situation.
E. My home state, Massachusetts, should also boost natural gas supplies: We have seen brownouts in California and winter misery in Texas. So what about my home state of Massachusetts? The lack of storage for natural gas is a big deal in Massachusetts also. We are usually one polar vortex away from disaster. We had polar vortex in 2015 and in 2019. During both times, natural gas spot prices shot up due to lack of storage and inability to meet the increase in demand. In those 2 weeks, we spent on natural gas what we spend normally spend during the entire winter season. Some of the spending was attributable to higher usage but most of it was due to higher spot prices. We even opened mothballed coal and oil electricity generation plants and increased pollution. Since the natural gas procurement costs are passed on to the rate payers and averaged over 3 years. Each polar vortex boosted our home heating bill by 33% over a 3-year-period. We are still paying for the 2019 polar vortex. That’s the reason why Massachusetts per unit energy costs are 30–50% more than the nationwide average. More storage and more pipelines simply boosts reliability. It doesn’t boost demand.
