Some scary words from ERCOT yesterday, two months removed from rolling power outages due to February's winter storm.
The power grid managers asked Texans to conserve. About a quarter of their generating capacity is off-line in maintenance mode, which is normal ahead of the hot summer months.
But ERCOT says a stalled out cool front and a lower than expected reserve of solar energy due to cloud cover cut in to their reserves. The call for conservation lasted for a few hours.
University of Houston energy economics professor Ed Hirs says Texas weather this time of year is unpredictable, but that's no excuse.
He says a few years ago, ERCOT faced a challenge when their reserve capacity was forecast to be quite low. "The chair of the Public Utility Commission simply stated that she was counting on god to help us get through the tight summer of electricity demand and supply. This is no way to run an electric utility."
He says another problem is ERCOT cannot force power generators to be ready to go. "There's no carrot and stick for ERCOT to employ on generation companies or transmission companies for that matter. It's a failed design."
Hirs believes our system should be fully regulated. He compares partial deregulation to the deregulation of a major highway. "We're taking all the speed limits off. You're still constrained by road conditions, entry lanes and exit ramps. Weather. It's just spin and Texas has been fed a bunch of spin for the last 20 plus years."
He would like to see Texas join the Eastern or Western grid, but says we might not be welcome. "We would certainly be the weak link in this whole process. We can't get our own house in order. It's up to Texans to fix this, and then maybe those two guys on either side would be happy to connect with us. At this moment, we'd bring them down."
