Reporting by Lynn Walker, Wichita Falls Times Record News
The Texas electrical grid made it through a hot summer without conservation alerts or rolling blackouts, according to the Reliable Grid Project, a national network of experts who keep an eye on energy supply.
At an online forum Tuesday, Oliver Bernstein of Reliable Grid Project, said renewables and battery storage played a significant role in enabling the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid to perform better than other grids across the nation this summer.
Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said wind provided about 27% of ERCOT’s electricity, and solar provided about 16%.
“Both of those are growing,” he said.
Rhodes said the use of natural gas to make electricity stayed relatively constant while coal showed signs of “getting squeezed out.”
He said while demand for electricity set records multiple times during the summer, both wind and solar usage also set records.
“And then batteries also continued to set a whole lot of records,” he said.
Nikhil Kumar, program director of GridLab, a nonprofit that distributes technical expertise on electrical grids, said parts of the country set heat records during the summer. But Texas did not call on emergency actions that other grids had to use.
He said the PJM grid, which is twice as large as the ERCOT grid and serves much of the East Coast, gets only a fraction of its electricity from solar and wind and had to burn more fuel.
He said other grids had to call on spare generation and data centers to alleviate some of the demand.
Juliana Gianni, an analyst for Goff Policy, an energy consultant to the industry, agreed that renewable energy and storage kept the past summer “pretty uneventful” in Texas.
She also said ERCOT is driven purely by market signals which incentivize whatever source is the cheapest to run.
“With wind and solar you have no input fuel costs,” she said. “These energy generation resources are able to bid into the market at very low prices.”
Data centers, power supply buildout and the Texas electrical grid
She also said ERCOT is not subject to federal oversight like other grids are.
“Texas is famously light on regulations, so we have fewer bureaucratic hurdles here,” she said.
Gianni also said electrical transmission infrastructure has historically been cost prohibitive, but developers of large load projects, such as data centers, are willing to front a lot of the cost.
“This is significant because transmission buildout benefits everyone,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News.
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