As severe winter conditions move into parts of Texas over the next five days, San Antonio residents and business leaders are again questioning if Texas’ energy grid is prepared to withstand extreme cold.
Temperatures are expected to plummet into the teens and 20s in San Antonio on Monday and Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service, and could get as low as the single digits in parts of North Texas. However, no precipitation is forecast for the San Antonio area during the freeze.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Texas’ power grid operator, issued on Wednesday a weather watch for Jan. 15-17, noting that “grid conditions are expected to be normal” during the watch. It added that ERCOT will “monitor conditions closely and will deploy all available tools to manage the grid, continuing a reliability-first approach to operations.”
Since 2021’s Winter Storm Uri left hundreds of thousands of San Antonians without power and water during a days-long weather event that led to the deaths of an estimated 200 people statewide, every subfreezing cold snap can be cause for anxiety. The state’s grid came close to failing, and CPS Energy — and its ratepayers — were left with a $1 billion tab as natural gas and wholesale energy costs soared. The utility has since whittled down those costs to roughly $418 million that’s been mixed into its rates.
On Wednesday, CPS Energy President and CEO Rudy Garza said he believes Texas is ready for the impending weather and reiterated that CPS Energy is in a good position heading into the weekend.
“All of [CPS Energy’s] generation is online, which I feel really good about,” Garza said during a mixer organized by the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “I think ERCOT is going to be fine. I talked to their CEO yesterday.”
In its latest Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy (MORA) report for January 2024, ERCOT noted a severe cold snap comparable to December 2022’s Winter Storm Elliott could create a 20.6% chance for a grid emergency around 8 a.m., when demand is high and the state’s solar sources aren’t fully online yet. The likelihood of rotating outages during that time is about 17%, the report notes.
Calls to build more reliability into the state’s grid have largely centered around growing the state’s natural gas supplies and power plants. However, renewables and batteries also will play an important part in continuing to shore up Texas’ power reserves, Garza said.
“We’ve got to get every megawatt on the system that we can possibly invest in,” Garza said. “There is not a bad form of generation right now, in spite all the crap you hear politically about wind and solar being the reason why the Texas energy market is in trouble. That’s a bunch of crap. When it’s available, it provides super-low energy prices for consumers, which is a good thing.”
During a Q&A session with chamber members, Garza reflected on the state of San Antonio’s municipally owned utility when he inherited it from previous CEO Paula Gold-Williams just weeks after the 2021 winter storm. Since then, the utility has approved a new generation portfolio that will phase out coal by 2028, gotten two rate increases approved, hired hundreds of new employees and started phasing out its 23-year-old computer system.
Still, Garza apologized to the business owners in the room for the issues that took place during and following Uri, adding he’s aware it was traumatic for many San Antonians.
“If you were impacted by that experience, I’ll just say, I’m sorry,” he said. “That is not what CPS Energy tries to be for our community. We failed in a lot of regards during the winter storm that year, and even though a lot of it was out of our control, we still bear responsibility for the experience.”
CPS Energy is a financial supporter of the San Antonio Report. For a full list of business members, click here.
