Mayor Pete, making clear how pleased he and the other Democrat leftists are about the high price of gas - because that forces people to move towards electric cars. There is a HUGE problem with that kind of thinking, however. And as usual, the leftists have failed to take these practical concerns into consideration.
Massie's argument looks a little beside the point. Massie says the average household will use 7,480 kwh charging their cars. That's for 1.79 cars/household each driving 14,263 miles per year. If you pay 20 cents/kwh (cheaper than Cali, but more expensive than Texas), that's $1,496. If you had ICE cars getting 25.7 mpg, and you paid last year's price of $3.22/gallon (not even current price of $4.60), that usage would cost $3,199. Per year. Who cares that you're paying the utility instead of the gas station when you're saving 50%. Also, the amount of power used for air conditioning is a terrible reference because it is very different in different parts of the country. According the the EIA's RECS Report, Americans use 2,084 kwh/year on air conditioning (a little higher than what Massie says). But, it's 4,002 kwh/year in the West South Central Region (which includes Texas) and only 660 kwh/year in New England. To get a real understanding of the size of EV demand, compare to the usage of some other major appliances (on national averages): 1.79 EVs driving 14,263 miles each: 7,480 kwh Space heating: 3,242 Water heating: 3,140 Air conditioning: 2,084 Lighting: 1,105 Clothes dryer: 776 TVs/Related: 760 Refrigerator: 756 The average American household is using 10,720 kwh/year (14,324 in West Central South and only 7,515 in New England). So, if you were to do a complete conversion of our vehicle fleet to EVs and not change our driving habits, you could be looking at an average 70% increase in household electricity consumption. And residential consumption is about 39% of the country's electricity use. So, it's sizeable. But still, half the cost of burning gasoline. And cleaner too.
You are just looking at how much it would supposedly cost. That is not the point of this at all. We are talking about the Texas electricity grid here. There is not anywhere close to enough capacity to provide this amount of electricity and to try would be to crash the grid in spectacular fashion. Meanwhile, these people will not be able to charge their cars in a convenient of dependable manner, making transportation in them frequently very difficult and in some cases impossible.
1. We do not have enough generation capacity today to serve that load. But, cars are long-lived assets. Even if all new car sales were EVs starting today, it'd be 15-20 years before we converted the whole fleet. So we don't need to have the capacity today. We will build the capacity as demand requires. 2. Aside from generation capacity, the transmission and distribution systems for power will need to be beefed up to accommodate higher loads. But again, we have 15-20 years to make those upgrades and fit them into the distribution charges to get them paid for. The additional capacity in both generation and T&D will likely be paid for by the the higher volumes and higher per kwh rates shouldn't be necessary. 3. The higher power demands will incentivize more investment in generation and more power plants will be built. However, there is currently a lot of emphasis on incentivizing EV owners to charge at offpeak hours (at night) to flatten the usage curve so you don't actually need to increase generation and T&D by 27% just because demand would increase 27%. If you're charging the EV at night, your AC is not working as hard in those hours, and you're presumably not running your dryer, your TV, or whatever, during those hours. 4. Also, EV batteries are very flexible load. In short-term scarcity events, you can curtail EV charging because you're already charged up, or even (some day) reverse flow and use EV batteries to power your house or the grid itself. Much like having bitcoin miners, having easily curtailable load on the grid is very useful, because they provide the demand to economically support higher levels of generation capacity, but it's very easy to turn off their demand if scarcity strikes anyway so that other, more critical users can benefit. 5. I don't even know what you're referencing about charging your cars in a convenient or dependable manner. It's pretty convenient and dependable now and will be getting dramatically better over the next few years.
News is slightly stale, but I'm just getting around to it. The Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee sent a letter to the PUCT asking them to stop with the market redesign they are pursuing because they don't have confidence they are headed in the right direction. Here's a recent article on it: Texas lawmakers ask state agency to delay power market redesign | The Texas Tribune For context, after Uri Texas set about making a number of improvements to make sure we don't have another generation shortfall. They did some Phase 1 stuff, like requiring more winterization of plants, but the big lever of this whole effort was going to be a re-design of the wholesale market to finally give up on our "energy-only" market and having a mechanism to reward companies for being reliably available, like most restructured markets in the country. This is the improvement that will make the biggest difference for improving the Texas grid, not the weatherization thing. They hired an outfit of economists called E3 to recommend something, and they came out with a report that evaluated a number of plans and recommending one they call Forward Reliability Market (FRM). Here is another article that gets into the weeds about what the proposed structures would do: Article. Now, to editorialize. It looks like Republican legislators are unhappy with E3's approach because, while it does reward reliability that is most easily monetized by gas-fired generation, it is ultimately technology-neutral. And it sounds like the Republicans would really like to see a program that overtly punishes renewable gen and overtly favors the building of gas CCGTs. There was one model called Dispatchable Energy Credits that seems to grab that ****-renewables vibe because it pays dispatchable (fossil fuel) generation and makes non-dispatchable (renewable) less economic, forcing them out of the market entirely. I suspect Republican politicians favor this model because their ideology has painted a target on renewable gen. The problem is: they are focused on vanquishing their political enemies and not focused on the problem of insufficient generation capacity in times of stress. Everyone in this process, from the PUC to ERCOT to E3, seems to already agree we need more gas-fired CCGTs and every plan is focused on getting it. There's no radical tree-hugging going on around here. So there's no need for the legislature to throw their weight around. But when the economists look at DEC, they find reliability does not improve because it drives renewable generation out of the market. And I'm worried that's exactly what the legislators are going to go for.
Thinking about this again because of Winter Storm Elliott, which caused rolling blackouts in a few places like Tennessee and North Carolina, but not in Texas. Texas did get some downed power lines and some generating units were impacted (and natural gas service was curtailed in North Texas), but ERCOT wasn't significantly threatened. But I looked particularly at North Carolina where Duke Energy runs the biggest utilities in the state. On Christmas Eve, they had a generation shortfall which threatened the stability of the frequency on the Eastern Interconnect that forced them to institute rolling blackouts (that didn't roll properly) to avoid grid collapse, just like ERCOT experienced in Uri. Their event was less severe and less long, but basically the same story. Here's an article if you want. So for folks wringing their hands about how deregulation endangered ERCOT, North Carolina faced the same problems with almost none of the deregulation story. The utilities own power plants themselves so there is no divided loyalty there, they are on the Eastern Interconnect so its a big pool for grid frequency, they can trade with neighbors because they aren't an island. They also have very little in renewables. They rely heavily on coal, gas, and nukes and didn't have fuel problems. Here's what happened. Weather was colder than the weather forecast predicted by a few degrees. There was also high winds. And given the timing -- Christmas Eve on a Saturday -- predicting customer behavior was a little tricky. They ended up under-forecasting the demand even if they'd been right about the temperature. But they had enough generation the day before for expected demand plus reserves (which are supposed to cover forecasting mistakes and problems). Several power plants (which had just completed their winterization program) were "derated" (meaning they stayed operational but couldn't produce as much power as the usually do) by 1,300 MW because of cold-weather-related mechanical failures. They were also relying on about 1,400 MW of imports from neighbors in PJM (states north of them). But PJM was having its own scarcity problem and curtailed their exports. So instead of being up by 1,000 MW, they were down by 1,000 MW. When you're down, it drags the frequency of the grid off of the 60 Hz standard and you can only go a couple Hz before the whole thing (that is, the Eastern Interconnect) collapses. So they start shedding load at 6:30 am on Christmas Eve. They have a software tool that is supposed to rotate their rolling blackouts every 15 minutes. It worked for about a third of the load shed. But, for some reason, the tool did not initiate a blackout for another part and failed to rotate the blackouts for the rest. To solve the immediate problem, they took down 2 transmission lines and saved the frequency. Then they had to manually de-energize circuits to bring the lines back up. The imbalance, thankfully, was solved pretty quickly and they started restoring power. However, it is mechanically dangerous to re-energize circuits that have been blacked out for awhile, especially in cold weather, so they had to do it in increments and didn't get power to everyone until 4:30 pm. In the end, the blackout was at worst 10 hours, which pales in comparison to what Texas had suffered in Uri. This isn't a comparison in degree. But people not in the industry think the largest machine in the world should just work perfectly 100% of the time, and it's just not realistic. I find 99% effectiveness pretty damn impressive. North Carolina had a natural disaster like we had, and some of their equipment failed like ours had, and it created a grid crisis like we had that can only be solved with rolling blackouts -- except the rolling blackouts don't roll because regulated utilities in both states are incompetent. Texas has been watching dwindling generation reserve margins for years because of our deregulated model and Uri was the kick in the pants that will probably give us a model that will pay generators enough to build more generation. But, North Carolina's completely regulated model has the same weaknesses. The problem isn't the economic model. The problem is we don't want to pay for gen that will almost never be used, but with climate change we're finding that they're needed more often than we thought. We need to understand we need more buffer for volatility than we used to -- and the more renewables we have the more buffer we'll need too -- and be willing to pay for it.
At the risk of turning this thread into my own personal blog (too late!), I also wanted to make a comment about Texas' experience in Winter Storm Eliott. We had set a new december peak demand at around 75 gw, and over 20 gw of that was met with wind. Without all that wind generation, we'd have been in rolling blackouts again as some thermal plants got knocked down again despite the increased winterization regimes. Thank god for all those wind turbines. But... then the wind generation had a huge drop to almost nothing a day later. We were okay because some of the fossil fuel plants that had problems early got fixed and were back in service to pick up the slack. But this is the conundrum of renewables: they can contribute lots of clean and cheap electricity, but you don't get to say when. I love having renewables in the stack to keep electricity cheap, but when you're in an emergency like a winter storm or a heat wave, they can leave you in the lurch. You need to either have a plant or a battery you know you can turn on to supply the last watt, or have a factory or some other big draw that you can turn off to not need that last watt. Trusting that the sun or the wind is going to show up just when you need it is flirting with rolling blackouts and grid collapse.
@JuanValdez Yea, we all know you can't rely on renewable (at this time) to meet peak demand. Sounds like ERCOT underestimated demand and we got lucky this time (thx god for the high wind). They need to be a bit more conservative - base their peak estimate not on what's forecasted as likely but closer to what's forecast as possible worse case conditions and expectation of usages. Have a buffer for critical infrastructure and do ask customers to conserve during these peaks. And with 2 powerful polar vortexes in 3 years, don't assume it's won't be a regular occurrence - instead, assume it will be. [Climate has changed rapidly and will continue to change]
They did miss on the forecast, as did many utilities in the East and Midwest. Getting the forecast right is important, but if the last watt of generation doesn't exist it doesn't matter that you forecasted you were going to need it. By the time you get the weather report, your fleet is your fleet.
You can't get the forecast exactly right - but you can be more conservative within the range of possibilities (for example, I think it was 14F to 20F in Houston with 16-18F as likely). Because they underestimated (assuming they went with the likely forecast and whatever model they used for forecasting usage), they didn't tell customers to conserve. I would have conserved if there was that message. They scrambled once they realized they underestimated. Beef up the fleet.
Forecast errors tend to err on being too conservative (which comes with its own costs). This was a big miss in the other direction this time. They need to figure out why still. But in this case, asking for conservation was actually not needed. If they ask for conservation and people find out it was just an 'abundance of caution' thing, people will start tuning those calls out. When you ask for conservation, you don't want people to shrug and say, 'oh they're just trying to save a buck.' Anyway, media makes it sound like it was a scramble, but for the industry it was just the usual. As for the fleet, we need more dispatchable plants to have capacity to call in situations like these. But, you can't just order them built. To spend millions for incremental MW you'll only need for 15 minutes in the year is the economic problem we need to solve. We have been using this scarcity pricing model that pays $9/kwh in these events with the hope investors will find it worthwhile to build a plant to capture those peaks. It hasn't worked. Part of the reason it is difficult is that you have this unpredictable wind fleet with zero variable cost that always gets in the generation stack before your gas plant (that's why guys like Abbott say that renewables are making our grid unreliable). So, profits are low in normal times and you never know when the peak price events will show up (and whether wind will gobble up 20 GW that day). The process in the PUCT right now -- and the thing the legislature is saying they plan to meddle in -- is fixing that model so investors can make money building dispatchable plants. Only when the model is right will the fleet actually get beefed. It'll happen, but a couple years from now.
The September electric bill was quite shocking. No, it’s not because of the heat. The delivery charge from CenterPoint Energy increased by a whopping 47% on September 1st. Other TDUs implemented substantial increases as well. Meanwhile, just this past Wednesday, Texas paid a Bitcoin miner over $31 million ($22 million above the value of mined Bitcoin) to cut their energy usage due to extreme demand from the heat. Got to give it to Gov. Abbot for upholding the great Texas tradition of being the number one state for business. I'm sure more bitcoin miners are on their way here tomorrow. Enjoy your upcoming electricity bill.
that's how you manage overdemand no different than an airline offering payment to give up your seat for a later flight when it's overbooked
I sure hope we aren't getting into a situation where the Texas grid is operating like Southwest Airlines. But with the heat getting worse and Gov. Abbott prioritizing Business, I'm not very confident. Personally, I think we shouldn't incentivize kickbacks at all. But I do realize this is a hard problem to solve and kickbacks are necessary given the state's stellar track record of beefing up the grid in a timely manner. So if we are gonna kickback, why not give the money back to Texans - y'all can get a few bucks back if you decrease your electricity usage between the peak hours of 5-9 PM. And if we want to be proactive, we could consider banning massive electricity usage by entities that contribute next to nothing to society while putting the public at risk of death. Unfortunately, kickbacks typically operate circularly, so I'm sure Gov. Abbott and the TX legislators are thrilled with the status quo.
