Texas Has Never Had a Summer Blackout — Here’s Why That May Change

A summer blackout is still unlikely — for now. But that’s changing fast as the intensity and duration of heat waves increase. There are ways we can better prepare.

Yesterday marked the first official day of summer, and the weather forecast already looks like a nightmare.

ERCOT kicked off the season with its first official energy conservation call this week. As I’ve said, it’s still unlikely that Texas will have blackouts this summer.

But the likelihood is greater than it was this time last summer. And it’s still going to increase each summer going forward, as rising greenhouse gas emissions load the dice and increase the probability of deadly heat waves like this one.

The current heat dome sitting over Texas would be “basically impossible” without climate change. There is absolutely zero doubt in the scientific literature that human caused climate change is making heat waves more intense, more frequent, and longer lasting. 

But see if Governor Abbott, his appointees, and other leaders will even say “climate change” let alone do something about it. But climate change isn’t the tooth fairy — it exists whether or not politicians believe in it. 

Texas is ground zero for climate change. We’ve got it all: heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, deadly freezes … the list goes on. It’s time our political leaders, including the political appointees at the PUCT and ERCOT finally deal with the reality.

Facing Reality

Keeping the air conditioning on through these hellish heat waves requires the state to do a lot of things right. Here are a few:

Don’t mess with solar power: Solar power is having a determinative impact on the grid this summer — without the state’s soon-to-be nation-leading resources, we likely would have had outages already. Yet the Legislature wasted valuable time and energy this year attacking solar developers. One proposal would have delayed all solar development by years and made many projects impossible. There are no perfect energy sources, but solar is as close to it as you can get for summer peaks during a heat wave. 

Add more storage: When a nuclear plant went down on June 16, storage provided the power Texas needed. Storage stepped in again four days later when a coal plant suddenly dropped offline at 7pm, right when the grid needed electricity the most. Wind and solar complement each other well — wind is typically at its lowest point when the sun is at its highest, and it picks up when the sun sets. Storage is beautifully suited to cover the periodic gaps of a few hours when combined wind and solar are lower, typically in the morning and late evening. This dispatchable, flexible resource boosts reliability.

Developers have now sited at least 3.3 gigawatts of storage within ERCOT, maybe more (new numbers are released at the beginning of each month). Policymakers have been obsessed with “things with an on-off switch,” as outgoing PUC Chair Peter Lake puts it. Storage is instantly available, whereas gas plants can take a half-hour, and sometimes much longer, to crank up. Texas needs more of it.

Help more Texans flex their demand and get paid: Each day when it’s crazy hot, demand rises and rises until, usually around 3:30 or 4, it flatlines. The temperatures aren’t dropping, and ACs are still running flat out. But big customers are being paid to reduce their electricity use when the supply gets tight — and homeowners, small businesses and other Texas customers deserve the same incentives.

Here’s how the current system works: big electricity users have two main components to their bills: energy and demand. The demand part, roughly half the bill, is determined entirely by how much energy they use during four 15-minute increments — one each in June, July, August, and September. It’s called 4CP (for four coincident peaks). Because large consumers’ bills are set for the entire next year by how much they use during those four 15-minute periods, they have a powerful incentive to save energy. If it looks like a record will be set one day during a summer month, these users sharply reduce their energy use. There’s an entire cottage industry around predicting 4CP and lowering demand in response; large users can save millions on their next year’s bill. 

It’s a massive effect: on a typical 4CP day, enough demand to power the entire city of Austin (about 3 gigawatts) drops offline and stays off for a few hours. Last July, 4CP reached 4.7 gigawatts, an all-time high.

4CP is not a perfect system — the Independent Market Monitor even wants to end it because it shifts costs to residential and small commercial customers. It’s also based on gross peak usage (which occurs around 4-5pm) and as more solar comes online, that usage peak is no longer the biggest challenge; we’re increasingly worried about twilight hours. 

Still, these demand reductions are making a difference for the grid this week, and they will next week as well. They’re also making a difference for the big users who participate in the system and save millions of dollars in electric costs as a result.

Smaller customers also deserve the ability to reduce their bills if they choose to.

Other Actions To Mitigate Risk

Solar, storage, and large customer demand response are already helping us during this ongoing heat wave. But there’s much more that can and should be done to help meet the challenges of this summer and future summers. Here are a few

• Create more local sources of power;

• Optimize energy use;

• Diversify energy sources; and

• Increase interconnections with neighboring power grids.

More to come on all of those topics.

In the meantime, as we all swelter through these triple-digit temperatures, let’s take some solace that the heat wave hit in June, when the ground still has some moisture in it. 

A heat dome like this in July or August could push temperatures in major metros into the 110s — or higher — and heat indices into the 120s. That would almost certainly cause rotating power outages. 

It’s possible that we’ll face that later this summer. It’s all-but-certain that we’ll face it in future summers.

If policymakers act now, they can prevent blackouts even in those extremes. It’s time to act, because extreme weather like this heat wave isn’t an aberration; it’s the new normal.