Update: ERCOT lifted the emergency declaration at 6 p.m., but urged consumers to reduce electricity use during peak electricity hours from 3 to 7 p.m. for the remainder of the week.
Texas’ grid operator declared a Level 1 Energy Emergency Tuesday afternoon as record heat across the state led to the second consecutive day of record power use.
Power demand topped out at 67,929 megawatts at 5 p.m. Tuesday, beating Monday’s all-time record of 66,867 megawatts. The prior record, 65,776 MW, was set on Aug. 23, 2010.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the electric grid for about 85 percent of the state, warned Monday of high power demand for the entire week.
But around 2:40 p.m. Tuesday ERCOT activated the first of a four-stage power warning system when surging demand sent power reserves below a key safety margin.
ERCOT called on consumers to conserve power, began bringing online all available power plants and tapping neighboring power grids, including about 130 megawatts from Mexico.
About 20 power plants with 3,000 megawatts of capacity were offline Tuesday due to unplanned outages, but Kent Saathoff, ERCOT’s vice president of system planning and operations, said that wasn’t unusual for a typical summer day.
One megawatt of power is enough electricity to power about 200 homes in Texas during hot weather when air conditioners are running for long periods of time.
It’s not clear if consumers responded to the call for conservation, Saathoff said.
“But we certainly hope so,” he said.
Saathoff said the state could continue to break demand records throughout the week, although thunderstorms or additional cloud cover could greatly reduce power demand in some areas.
“We’re concerned particularly for the rest of this week as temperatures are forecast to be at about the same levels,” he said.
Saathoff said about 1,800 megawatts of wind power was on the grid Tuesday, more than the 800 or so megawatts typically scheduled.
Tuesday’s emergency was the lowest in ERCOTs warning system, a Level 1. It is called if reserves drop below 2,300 megawatts.
A Level 2A emergency is declared if reserves drop below 1,750 megawatts. At that time industrial customers who have agreed previously to shut-down equipment in an emergency would be called on. That would relieve the system of about 1,000 megawatts of demand.
At Level 2B, when reserves are continuing to drop, another group of commercial customers would be called on to cut off their power use. That group accounts for about 300 megawatts of demand.
A Level 3 emergency is called when the outages begin to threaten the integrity of the entire grid. At that point local utilities — such as CenterPoint Energy in the Houston area — would be called on to do rotating blackouts, where certain circuits are cut off for 15 to 45 minutes — or longer — at a time.
Rolling blackouts are rare. ERCOT called for them in February when a sustained cold snap led to the failure of dozens of power plants.
Rolling blackouts were also used in 2006 to avoid deeper problems with an unseasonably warm spring day coincided with a number of power plants outages for maintenance work.
ERCOT asked for conservation on Monday but didn’t have to take any emergency steps, such as drawing on power from neighboring grids or asking pre-selected industrial customers to shut down.
But judging from some reader comments on Monday afternoon, one might have thought ERCOT had put out a call for our first-born children:
“We are now living in a 3rd world country,” said ‘Luckyone.’ ”I’ve lived in Texas all my life, and I don’t remember this happening before. It must be a result of Hope & Change.”
Luckyone must have been out of state temporarily during our Spring 2006 rolling blackouts and the many other conservation warnings we’ve had in summer’s past.
“NO!” shouted ‘Ed C.’ “What part of that do you not understand? I will now go cut my thermostat down and run my dryer just because you told me not too. Fix the PROBLEM liberal democrats! Get off your rear and do something about it!”
Since ERCOT didn’t need to take any real emergency measures Monday, should they have just said nothing to avoid sending people into a tizzy?
One argument is that if they didn’t warn us and there was a real emergency, ERCOT would likely face a whole lot of scrutiny from lawmakers and from the Texas Public Utility Commission.
But one reader — ‘GAPlatt’ — mentions a reason why ERCOT’s current approach to times of high power demand may not be the best.
In a nutshell, ERCOT is too quick to bring online spinning reserves — power units that are on contract for the day to fire up within 30 minutes to relieve a crunch. By bringing online these back-up units, ERCOT actually drives down the spot power prices that usually rise when there’s a shortage.
That may sound great for electric retailers and consumers — price spikes are flattened before they get too sharp.
But it also removes a price incentive that encourages companies to build power plants in Texas. It’s an issue Chron business columnist Loren Steffy wrote about earlier this summer.
That’s not to say Texas is short on power plants right now. We actually have plenty of units that are on the books as ready to operate to meet our needs (despite readers insisting they’ve been shut down by environmentalists).
Rather it’s a question of whether companies will keep building them in the future, to replace the older plants.
Do not plug in your electric car. Truly funny they give a 7500 tax rebate on Government general Motors car like the Volt. Get your goverment commie car from GM.
Thanks for the kind words. Re your second to last paragraph: don’t be too sure about that “plenty of units” part. I spent yesterday at the Generation Adequacy Task Force meeting (sometimes life is ironic) and one presenter noted that when we had our last emergency (June 27?) we only had 66,500 MW available due to forced outages. I got the impression that this was not an extreme amount of FO. Keep your flashlights handy this week!
Do not charge your laptop if you’re unable to express yourself cogently.
It strikes me as sad, but not surprising, that some adults get angry when they are asked to limit their consumption of something for a brief period of time. What a greedy bunch.
And, of course, they make it political. Grow up.
In the fifth to last paragraph the author mentions how ERCOT’s approach to power demand might not be the best, but his explaination didn’t seem to explain HOW THESE ELECTRIC PROVIDERS ARE NOT ABLE TO MEET DEMAND.
Agree w/ Loren more often than not, but I disagreed w/ him on this topic. Here is my comment to the Chron post of his Neither Fish nor Foul article:
ntangle 8:37 AM on May 26, 2011 So an efficient market would be one with frequent, large wholesale price swings? Wouldn’t the effect of that be to weed out the smaller fish among the REP’s? Rather than to cause wholesale providers to build new baseload generation? When it could be handled by adding (smaller) ramp capacity
http://www.chron.com/disp/discuss.mpl/business/steffy/7580091.html
“…66,867 megawatts megawatts…”=======”One megawatt of power is enough electricity to power about 200 homes….”=========So would that be 66,867 X 200 X 200?
Its funny that the right wing nuts always bring up electric cars when electricity is discussed. Talk about skewed perspective. But then again, that’s what their right wing radio tells them.
Ann electric car charges at night when there is plenty of power, and it uses electricity equivalent to a refrigerator not central A/C.
megawatt megawatts, Loren?
Wouldn’t that be 66,867 terrawatts? That would be enough energy to send nearly 81 million DeLoreans through time!
Umm, the Texas power grid demanded 66,867 megawatts in a single day.
I wonder how many megwatts alternative energy? This from the Toledo Blade two weeks ago:
“The Solar Energy Industries Association of Washington says Ohio produced 66 megawatts of photovoltaic modules in the first quarter of 2011.”
We are in trouble if the socialists continue to lead the US.
How do you cut your power use and get COOLER? Simple. Install solar security film on your windows – cut energy use up to 30% and get protection from burglar break ins and hurricanes at the same time. check it out at:
http://armorglass.blogspot.com/2011/08/excessive-heat-alert-how-to-cut-your.html
It’s funny that the looney left doesn’t understand the impact of electric cars and alternative energy when electricity is discussed. Talk about skewed perspective. But then again, that’s what the George Soros outlets tells them.
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If you were to have tens of thousands of electric cars charging at night along with the liberal desire to switch to solar and wind, you can forget about running your a/c and possibly refrigerator. At night, solar generation is gone; additionally, at night when convective mixing has stopped, surface wind can slow considerably, or even stop altogether, rendering wind turbines just about useless in many cases. And now that studies show the impact that wind turbines operating at night have on the bat poplulation, you’ll have to wonder if they’ll even be allowed to run at night. My guess is that bats are much more important to our environment than blind salamanders.
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I know that liberals choose not to look at the big picture (it doesn’t matter that Earth’s climate goes through cycles of warming and cooling periods, additional taxes will cause the climate to stabilize forever), but it’s something that us conservatives like to do. (Kind of like we listen to talk radio where the audience can directly talk to, dispute and debate the author of the subject matter rather than just take it as gospel). The liberals want to end coal and NG power plants and replace them with less effecient and more inconsistent power while making us reliant upon it while telling us we’re greedy and self absorbed for wanting both a/c and the ablitiy to cook at the same time.
This is what we get for using up all the cold air last winter. Should of conserved it back then.
ERCOT issued two reserve shortage advisories within the last half hour. Today’s load is running about 1,000 MW above forecast and the predicted peak is over 67k. There’s hardly a cloud in the TX sky and the next two days promise to be hotter. You did find that flashlight, right?
Hey looney Peter, all you right wing goose-steppers need to realize that there isn’t that many electric cars right now to make any effect whatsoever with the current situation. But you idiots keep brining it up like its the cause of the shortage! Makes you look like what you are, idiots.
And do a simple google search and see how much excess electricity we produce at night. Don’t rely on right wing radio for your facts, they make them up to keep you listening. Its not news its entertainment.
This would never be an issue had the greenies and lefty kooks not kept blocking this state from building nuclear power plants like we should have been for the last 30 years. This is all on the liberals, they should be the ones to go without in times of shortage.
Oh, my, an all time record! Think I’ll shut down my desktop & use my laptop.
It doesn’t matter whether you are left or right wing to know that it is hot, hot, hot. How much power would we need if the economy was going better? Chicken or egg, we had better start adding capacity asap.
hey west u coog,
electricity is produced to meet demand at all times. there is no “excess” produced anytime, much less at night. i think what you meant is EXCESS CAPACITY, which if the idiot peter bothers to do any fact checking will see that there is plenty of every night (or anytime when temperatures are milder and demand drops off). as a/c compressors throughout the state catch up with their heat loads in the evenings, electricity demand drops and generation is removed accordingly.
“Rather it’s a question of whether companies will keep building them in the future, to replace the older plants.”
————–
It’s a question of if the EPA will LET them build plants in the future.
…and West UCoog…turn off your radio and save some power. If you listen to it that much, you’re killing the grid.
People are mad because they pay money for power, but that service is not always provided. Further, since the state requires that everyone gets their power from one source without the option to get power elsewhere, the state has a certain responsibility to ensure that the power provider is providing the necessary service. The state has created a monopoly for centerpoint that we are pretty much powerless to challenge. The state should provide a severe penalty to Centerpoint if they cannot meet demand. If centerpoint was required to provide free electricity to everyone for each day of power outages, I bet that we would never have another power outage again.
Let’s try some back of the envelope calculations for electric cars. These will be grossly inaccurate, but hopefully within an order of magnitude. Per wiki, there are 250 million registered passenger vehicles in the U.S. for 2006. Or, roughly 0.8 cars for every person in the country. There are a bit less than 25 million people in Texas, so if the cars/person relationship for the country is true in Texas, that’s about 20 million cars. Just for Texas.
Per wiki, it takes anywhere from 10-23 kW-Hr of energy for every 100 kM you want to drive. Let’s call it 16 kW-Hr, which, as it happens, is the energy capacity of the Chevy Volt’s battery. Spread out the energy to charge the battery over 24 hours, and you end up needing 2/3 of a kW every hour to charge each electric car.
Now multiply that energy figure times however many cars you want to charge. If you were to replace 1/4 of the passenger cars with electric, you’d need on the order of 5 million cars X 2/3 kW, assuming you spread the charging load perfectly over every hour of the day. That’s an additional 3300 megawatts, or about 5% of the record energy usage that Mr. Fowler mentioned in his post today. Replace 1/2 and it’s 10% of the record high electrical energy used in Texas.
That’s an awfully big number. It would be interesting to compare 3300 megawatts to other power consumption figures, such as residential A/C. In practice, you wouldn’t spread out the charging perfectly over the day. In fact, many of those cars would be drawing power right now, recharging from taking their owners to work. So, not catastrophic, but not something the current grid could handle without a lot of beefing up.
Adam:
CenterPoint doesn’t generate power. THey just run the lines and poles. There are very few places where there isn’t a monopoly for power delivery in the U.S. Power generation in most of Texas is far from being a monopoly.
ERCOT: Start planning for next August. It’s going to be hot in Texas then too, FYI.
May the Power be with you.
Why all the hate against electric cars? Anyone buying an electric car is smart enough to know two things (1)get a variable rate plan where power is purchased off the hourly spot market price and (2) charge it from 10 Pm to 6 AM when spot prices are very low……way, way, way cheaper than the equivalent amount of energy derived from crude oil/gasoline.
Not to mention the benefit of getting our energy from America Vs nations that hate us. I am sick of sending $100 bills to the Middle East for a barrel of their overpriced crude.
@Jay, aka whatever.
The grid could accomodate a lot of EV’s now. It can generate & deliver 68 GW peak as is, as demonstrated today. Look at their load curve: http://www.ercot.com/
Its avg appears ~ 53 GW or so for the 24 hr period and its min < 40 GW.
So there's ample capacity for charging EV's offpeak. At a charging rate of twice or thrice your 3.3 GW example, since they'd be charging off peak when energy is cheapest (via multi-tiered prices, facilitated by smart meters).ntangle
I am disgusted by the ignorance of people who try to make stupid political statements on this issue. Grow up!
Peter said “IF YOU WERE TO HAVE tens of thousands of electric cars charging at night”
West U Coog: “… there isn’t (sic) that many electric cars right now to make any effect whatsoever with the current situation. But you idiots keep brining it up like its the cause of the shortage…”
I suggest you improve your reading skills. A helpful place to start might be “Subjunctive Mood” (see Future Subjunctive), perhaps on Wikipedia. Once you learn the subtleties of this grammatical device, it will open new doors for you.
And maybe tone it down a bit too. Implying people are Nazis in thread about electricity demand is worthy of ridicule.
Kudos to you, Gray Jay. I rarely see any commenters on the Chron make back-of-the-envelope calculations to support their point, or even just to add data to the conversation – even in technical articles like these.
However, I think one of your assumptions is not conservative enough. You assumed 24 hours are needed to fully charge a car, but I think it takes between 4 to 8 hours to fully charge a car’s battery. Let’s assume 6 hours. So, using your calculations, this would now account for between 20 and 40% of the total record load (24/6*5%, 24/6*10%). That’s quite significant.
I also think that technology of these batteries will improve, and perhaps you will eventually be able to charge them in only 2 hours. This would then account for between 60% and 120% of the current record load in Texas assuming everybody charged their cars at the same time. Realistically, most would probably charge their cars early in the night, starting between 5 pm and 11 pm. With a 6 hour range, the peak due to car charging along might then only be 20 – 40 % as above.
It’s hard to argue this won’t be a significant factor in the future. Now? No. In the future? Sure looks like it.
Mark you are an idiot! I think I’ll go lower my thermostat now.
My inner pedant is cringing at conflating power and energy in my previous post. Energy is the capacity to do work, with SI units of the Joule. Power is a measure of how much energy is consumed per unit time, with SI units of the Watt (1 Joule per second). So, a kiloWatt is a measure of power, but a kiloWatt X Hour is a measure of energy. I got 3300 MW from my assumption that all 24 hours in the day would be evenly used to spread the energy requirement of 80 GW X Hrs. Naturally, if you restrict eVehicles to charging during off peak, the required power will be greater.
If you limited charging to midnight-6AM, and required all of the eVehicle power to generated in a quarter-day, then you’d need 4 X 3300 MW/hour, or 13.2 GW for every one of those hours. It’s true that’s within the capacity of the system. I don’t know whether that’s sustainable currently. I imagine that power providers use the night hours to perform maintenance, which requires taking units off-line or otherwise lowering their load. Adding 13.2 GW to the system load is going to interfere with that, probably heavily.
Eyeballing the graph linked to by ntangle, I get an average power production of 52.0 GW. Multiplying that by 24 hours and I get ~1250 GW X Hrs of energy produced in Texas during that day. EVehicles will need 80 of that, or between 6-7%. Adding 6-7% to the required energy generation, will not be trivial, whether it’s restricted to nighttime (which, incidentally, will leave commuters in the lurch who planned on charging their cars at their employers) or spread out throughout the day.
Again, this won’t be impossible to solve, but it’s going to be an issue, the more EVehicles we put on the road. If the planet is getting warmer, and Texas continues to grow in population, energy production is a problem that will only continue to get worse.
Hey BOB. In case you didnt read the money that GM got was a loan, which is being paid back. Quite a few people have jobs with that company, and Im sure you wouldnt be so quick to judge if something similar happend with the company you work for. Might try to get some facts before you start crying again..
Sorry to hear so many liberal haters bearing the brunt of that Obama socialist pinko commie plot global warming which is beginning to show up in more frequent extreme weather and heat and.
According to those godless scientists in thrall to their Lord Al Gore things will only get much much worse for you, and will produce temperatures and drought making half the planet uninhabitable by humans by as soon as 2300.
Too bad Texas seceded from the socialist pinko Obama-plot the US grid so when you run short of power to deal with it we all can’t help you as neighbors.
Hi everyone – just wanted to stop by and congratulate all the people here who are engaging in sane, civil, open-hearted discussions about a problem that effects us all. I think the balanced, clear-minded people of goodwill throughout the US and the world should get more organized. Imagine what could be accomplished!