ERCOT Emergency Warning Shocks Texans On Mild April Day

It is not the kind of notification Texans expect to receive on a mild April day. Late Tuesday afternoon, officials at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) sent out a tweet containing the following message:

To be clear, that “stalled cold front” dropped the high temperature up in Amarillo all the way down to [checks Weather.com to be sure] 62 degrees. Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, way down at the southern tip of Texas, the temperature in Brownsville at the time ERCOT sent out its emergency message was 83 degrees, a pretty average temperature for that area at this time of year.

Ok, but what about storms that “stalled cold front” might have created? Again, according to the weather services and radar, the front only created some mild storms across a limited swath of northwestern Texas. No hail, no tornados, not much lightning. None of the severe conditions one might expect to cause issues on the Texas electricity grid. In fact, Tuesday appears to have been one of the very rare April days when, in all the vastness of Texas, not one square inch of land experienced severe weather of any kind.

Yet, ERCOT felt the need to send out a notice of potential emergency conditions, citing a “stalled cold front” as the partial reason. That really doesn’t seem to hold much water. Or, as former Texas Governor Ann Richards might say, ‘that cat don’t flush.’

Shortly after the ERCOT declaration went out, I received the following information in an email from the analytics/power team at Enverus:

• Telemetered unit outages are currently at 21.5GW. Normally for this time of year we are measuring about 14.5 GW
• The ERCOT board of directors is saying the reason for the heavy amount of outages is due to the maintenance required from the February winter storm
• Wind generation is 9 GW today and 7GW tomorrow which is much below average for this time of year. Normally for April 11 GW is what is expected.
• New Solar builds have been providing additional support recently, however, with heavy cloud cover across the state today and tomorrow this support has not been available. In fact, solar is only at 38% at peak load today but normally this number is 72%.
• Currently we have 2.5 GW of operating reserves at 5:30 PM.

Obviously, the ERCOT warning attracted the attention of the Texas news media. In a report on the matter, the Texas Tribune noted that “Data from ERCOT showed that the current demand for energy on the grid was near 49,000 megawatts at 5 p.m., when the available supply to the grid was about 50,000 megawatts. That’s much less than the peak demand it neared during February, about 72,000 megawatts, when energy use surpassed record levels as Texans tried to stay warm during a severe winter storm.”

“It borders the edge of reasonable,” the Tribune quoted Beth Garza, director of ERCOT’s independent watchdog from 2014 to 2019, as saying in response to the ERCOT explanation of events.

If the Texas grid is nearing emergency conditions on a mild April day like Tuesday, it begs the question of what is going to happen to the state and its people when August rolls around with 100+ degree temperatures covering the length and breadth of the state?

Meanwhile, lobbyists for the power generators who apparently came close to not meeting statewide demand on one of the mildest weather days of the year on Tuesday continue to tell legislators that the state has plenty of capacity in their efforts to tamp down support for the plan being offered by Berkshire Hathaway BRK.B . As noted previously, the Berkshire Hathaway plan envisions the construction of 10,000 megawatts of new, fully-weatherized natural gas-fired generating capacity. The 10 new plants would be sited across the state geographically, would house 7 days of fuel on-site, and would serve as reserve baseload capacity to be activated in case of actual weather emergencies such as the one experienced in mid-February.

The implications here are obvious: If that 10,000 megawatts of reserve baseload capacity existed today, there would have been no emergency notices coming out of ERCOT on Tuesday. Had it existed in February, the more than 200 Texans who lost their lives as a result of having no electricity for several days during the depths of the arctic freeze would still be alive. This is serious stuff.

Hindsight is admittedly 20/20, but there is no excuse for Texas policymakers to keep creating the conditions for such hindsight to engage. As proponents for doing nothing one more time continue to try to run out the clock on this legislative session, hopefully Tuesday’s shocking near-emergency will serve as a wake-up call for action.