Texas’ electric grid operator declared a Level 1 power emergency on Wednesday afternoon and came close to going to a higher state of emergency as power generation reserves dropped below 2,300 megawatts.
This was the second day in a row the Electric Reliability Council of Texas called such an emergency. ERCOT asked all available power plants to come online, began drawing on power from neighboring grids, including Mexico, and asked consumers to cut back usage through 7 p.m.
And for the third day in a row the state broke the record for power use, with 68,294 megawatts used during the 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. hour. That broke the record set Tuesday of 67,929 megawatts.
ERCOT originally said it thought it would have to declare a Level 2A emergency, but the peak hour passed without operators having to take the next step, said Kent Saathoff, ERCOT’s vice president of system planning and operations.
“We were within about 50 megawatts of going to Level 2,” Saathoff said in a conference call Wednesday afternoon.
A Level 2A emergency is called 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.
At 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.
As much as 4,000 megawatts of power capacity was offline unexpectedly on Wednesday, helping to squeeze the margin between supply and demand as the state headed into the peak usage hours late in the afternoon.
The number of power plants offline unexpectedly on Wednesday was slightly higher than on Tuesday, Saathoff said, but it’s not unusual for about 5 percent of the state’s roughly 70,000 megawatts of power plant capacity to go offline in the summer.
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.
Texas was still several steps away from rolling blackouts, which have only occurred three times in the past few decades. The most recent occurrence was in February, when a sustained cold snap led to the failure of dozens of power plants.
The extreme hot and cold weather in Texas this year has “certainly been weird” Saathoff said, but he’s not sure if the events will necessarily lead to radical changes in the state’s power system.
“You can’t afford to build a system that will give you 100 percent reliability,” Saathoff said. “It’s a question of what extreme events do you design and build a system for.”
Grid operators are expecting Thursday and Friday to also be days that see high electricity demand. Consumers are being encouraged to reduce their usage, particularly from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. both days.
The tension mounts. 345kV ?
Hopefully today’s blog will not be filled with people complaining about electric vehicles causing grid problems…unreal.
How about a blog devoted to ways to conserve energy like buying CFC light fixtures, programmable thermostats, insulating attics, upgrading efficiency of AC units…on and on. It would also be nice to hear from people that have installed solar power in their homes or even stories from actual owners of EVs!
So did summer come as a complete surprise again this year?
It was reported on the news in Dallas that Texas had to BUY electrical power from Mexico…. There are HOW many illegal aliens in TEXAS on WELFARE and Mexico sells TEXAS power? How outrageous is this?
I agree with you, woody, that it is silly to blame Texas’s current energy delivery problems on the current number of eVehicles. My post yesterday was just looking at the potential estimated effects on the power grid of replacing a significant number of passenger vehicles with eVehicles. While those future effects may be significant, we are certainly nowhere near there yet.
I agree with you on wanting to hear actual usage stories from people with eVs and solar panels, and other energy saving devices. I’d also like to read about the heavy subsidies that support the low prices for eVs and solar panels. As for replacing A/C units, light bulbs, and the like, in a perfect world, we’d have price signals from the market, telling us whether or not it made economic sense to take on added costs now for those conservation steps, in the hopes of saving money in the future with lower power bills. A blog post going through those fiscal tradeoffs would be interesting to read, again, especially if the costs of subsidies such as Texas’s appliance replacement program are shown.
Regardless, as Texas continues to grow in population, and as the planet continues to warm, Texas is going to have to figure out a way to expand its power generation and delivery, tie to other grids, or do without power. This will be true whether or not everyone ends up driving a Volt or a Leaf.
Olivia
This story here notes the 130 megawatts that ERCOT brought over from Mexico as well. We’ve had DC (direct current) ties with Mexico and the surrounding regions for decades in order to be able to move power both ways should either of the parties need it.
Saw a guy in West Texas serving Barbecue straight off the cow today!
Our electricity “browned out” twice yesterday. I’m conserving just about as much as I can.
Indianpaintbrush:
Do you really mean “browned out” as in things dimmed? Or did power actually go out? I lost power at my house near Reliant Stadium on Monday (oh, the irony) just as ERCOT put out the release about the record. But it turned out just to be a localized line issue with CenterPoint that impacted about 1000 customers for an hour.
Tom, you should write an article/blog on the DC Ties, why we have them, and what they do operationally for the grid. If we had better import/export capability via more robust AC interfaces – as the rest of the Eastern Interconnection does, as well as the Western Interconnection – then we could offset some capacity issues with imports. Objective data analysis indicates that even Feb. 2 wouldn’t have been the crisis day that it was. Things are more marginal today with SPP setting usage records, but more interfaces brings more price convergence and a flattening of the system’s risk profile. All of this because some Texas politicians think that they are evading FERC oversight! I’ve had legal experts tell me that is not true in the first place, and not to mention that ERCOT follows basically all market initiatives that FERC requires on others, anyway!
I would also argue that you should educate readers on what the lack of a transparent, functional capacity market does for ERCOT.
Stay cool! My AC is on 70 degress!
Today’s peak estimate was just increased to 69,114.
The lights “dimmed”
I just turned our pool pump off, set my thermostats higher(again), no tv on, no lights on. Other than the computer and the washing machine I can’t think of any other ways to conserve, and the washing machine is almost done. My stove is gas(thank god), so dinner will go as planned.
I am sick and tired of all these dang EVs coming to our country and stealin our peweeer. Dey toook eerrr peweeer!
Tom Fowler wrote:
“I lost power at my house near Reliant Stadium on Monday”
———————–
That was because they were replacing all the stadium lights with those curly light bulbs and it shorted the whole grid out.
How about a blog devoted to ways to conserve energy like buying CFC light fixtures, programmable thermostats, insulating attics, upgrading efficiency of AC units…on and on. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Woody, everything you’ve mentioned costs money.
Some of us don’t have very much.
But that’s a good idea. Why don’t you start your own blog?
It’s hot, yes, but there are also more people living in Texas than ever before, right?
I’m so glad we have our new open-market grid. After all, we no longer have to deal with super high prices or companies like Enron bidding up electricity prices with shell businesses or interruptions of service like rolling black outs.
Um, wait… we actually ARE having these problems today, and we didn’t have them before! Got it backwards. Sorry about that. As you were…
Summer crept up on ercot again. Ercot has no idea that it gets hotter and hotter every year.
Are we ever going to get a reason why so many plants are going offline?
Pat:
They say it’s not unusual, that given the 400 or so power plants in the state it’s nto unusual to have 20 or so have to go offline for one reason or another. On one hand I wouldn’t expect all plants to be able to run at all times. But at the same time it feels like a lot of outages. I’m looking into how these recent numbers compare to historical numbers, but the information is taking a while to gather.
tom- what are your numbers for the volume of power shaved off by the level 2a and 2b emergency interruptible load shedding?
my understanding is that there are at least 3 traunches, and that the only time we used them this week we shed approx. 3,000 mw of load, which is a significant difference from what you claim they have the ability to shed.
what are your numbers based on*