Energy Economist On ERCOT's Rate-Spiking Business Plan: "We Teach This In School"

[hatrack]

On Monday, Texans were asked to reduce their electricity usage during a heat wave this week, so that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) could ensure they had enough juice to keep the A/C’s on across the state through the (climate-changed) 90+ degree weather. Given that last time extreme weather caused a massively lethal blackout in Texas, fossil fuel fans prematurely blamed renewables, it’s likely they’ll do it again this week. Nevermind that it was false when they said it about Texas, and false when they said it about California last year, too.

Edward Klump and Mike Lee of E&E contacted ERCOT, and spoke with its senior director of system planning Warren Lasher. He told them that while variability in renewable sources of power is “somewhat large,” it’s also “well-known,” so they can plan for it. But what’s unexpected “is the forced outages in the thermal [gas and coal] fleet.” It’s not the predictable swings of wind and solar power that’s causing issues, but the outages from nuclear and fossil fuel plants that seem to have caught them off guard—8,000 of the 11,000 MW of power generation that was down on Monday was thermal plants. (Wind, by contrast, was only down 1,500 MW, and is expected to pick up over the course of the week.)

EDIT

Beyond the regular failures of fossil fuel infrastructure, Texas power plant operators may have learned an unfortunate lesson this year, when energy companies raked in millions and billions of dollars by nailing customers with five-figure energy bills — bills for which the state PUC lifted shutoff protections last week. Because the Texas grid is independent of a larger regional one, and is largely deregulated, it wouldn’t be difficult for unscrupulous companies to manipulate prices. Similar to how Enron did in California, if these companies shut off a power plant and declare it offline, prices will rise. Then, they can “fix” the plant to bring it back online and then sell their power at a much higher rate, explained energy economist Ed Hirs. “We teach this in school,” the University of Houston professor told E&E.

Which just leaves the question of whether these thermal plants, whose supporters promote them over climate-friendly alternatives in part based on their supposed reliability, are going offline because they’re not actually reliable, or because their operators are deliberately exploiting Texas’s deregulated grid. Either way, it’s not a great look.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/6/16/2035565/-If-Texas-Goes-Dark-Again-It-ll-Again-Be-Because-Of-Climate-Change-Fossil-Fuels-and-Deregulation#view-story

[captain queeg]

1. The timing is kind of suspicious. Certainly reminds me of Enron.

Would be interesting to find out how many of these outages were scheduled vs how many are “forced”. You’d think ERCOT would have some control of the scheduled outages and not have such a huge portion out at the same time.

[abqtommy]

2. Enron has come and gone but grifting humans carry on. Grifting humans have got to go, let

the sun shine and the four winds blow.

[NickB79]

3. If the water sources for cooling get too warm, thermal plants shut down

I'd be curious how hot their cooling ponds are right now.