Lubbock Times

An Electric Reliability Council of Texas forecast that power consumption would be lower than actually occurred contributed to the power grid nearing emergency conditions this week, according to a Texas Tech University energy and economics professor.

“There was just higher consumer demand later in the day than expected and ERCOT hadn't asked for enough generation to be available to get through those hours,” Dr. Michael Giberson, associate professor of energy, economics, and law with Texas Tech University Free Market Institute, said.

Other than mild weather and normally scheduled or expected outages, April 13, was a normal day until Texas' grid operator, ERCOT, sent an appeal for Texans to conserve electricity use because of allegedly near emergency conditions, according to media reports.

Texas Tech University’s Rawls College of Business Associate Professor at Michael Giberson | depts.ttu.edu/

“We obviously had stressful times in February that resulted in some outages,” Giberson told the Lubbock Times. “At the time, you do quick repairs to get back in production as soon as possible but that probably leaves you with some extra maintenance to do a little later on in the springtime.”

According to ERCOT system conditions data, the wind hit its peak generation of almost 17,000 MW the next day on April 13 at 1 a.m. Wind generation subsequently dropped to about 5,000 MW during the daily periods of regular increased demand. Even the 5,000 MW, wind generation for April 13 was 3,000 MW less than what was forecasted.

“It was a little bit warmer than expected so the bump in demand in the evening was higher than expected and when power was dropping off this week. It's been dropping off mostly in the late afternoon and evening just as that bump is coming up, which contributed to the need for more of those additional units to be available and it just happened to be at a time of year where lots of those thermal power plants are offline for maintenance,” Giberson said in an interview.

In addition to lagging wind generation, the Texas Tribune reports that solar generation was also unavailable as it failed to reach projected output to the grid due to cloudy weather.

“The emergency was in the evening hours on Tuesday and these are already the hours where solar is expected to drop off,” Giberson said. “Wind is less predictable. Sometimes it's high and sometimes it's low but you can reliably predict when solar is going to go to zero because it's going to happen around seven or eight o'clock in Texas these days.”

As previously reported in the Houston Republic, recent winter storms exposed the danger of energy policies that make the state too dependent on wind and solar energy and the extreme cold and snow caused the wind turbines to freeze, leading to power outages across the state during a time of overwhelming demand for energy

“Typically, it’s only one or two turbines in a farm that are offline at a time for repairs so that you don't usually have this sort of dramatic impact,” Giberson said. “It's like taking a 500-megawatt natural gas plant offline or an 800-megawatt coal plant offline for maintenance.”

Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian recently told the Austin News that the reliability issue isn't so much the existence of renewable energy, but that it has displaced reliable generation because they have been prioritized and subsidized by tax dollars.

According to a report from America's Power, through 2018, renewable energy resources—primarily wind and solar—have received subsidies amounting to more than $100 billion.

“It's clear that as wind is built and now increasingly solar is built in Texas, that energy is getting sold in the market and that's energy that would otherwise have been produced by a natural gas or coal plant,” Giberson said. “So, to some extent, that new wind development does replace money that would have gone to natural gas. This has been happening for a decade or two.”

Charles McConnell, the executive director of the Center for Carbon Management in Energy and Sustainability at the University of Houston, told the Houston Republic that Chapter 313 subsidies are one of several tools that Texas uses to "encourage the investments and the deployment of renewables – both wind and solar.”

McConnell points out that the way renewables often operate means that they would not be profitable without government subsidies and other handouts. 

As a result, Texas' reserve margin has dramatically decreased due to the subsidizing of renewable energy projects.

“There is likely a role there,” Giberson said. “We're producing power through renewables that don’t have quite the capacity value that thermal plants do.”