Hours after the Electric Reliability Council of Texas called off a conservation request to prevent implementing rolling outages statewide, the grid operator has issued another plea.
This is the first time this year ERCOT has issued voluntary conservation requests on consecutive days and the grid operator’s fifth issuance this summer; four of those requests have come within the last eight days.
ERCOT is again asking Texans to conserve electricity use from 3-9 p.m. Friday, and warned it “expect[s] these conditions to persist through the weekend because of extreme heat.” The grid operator advised Texas to stay tuned for additional communications throughout the weekend.
“Similar to [Thursday], [Friday’s] conservation appeal does not indicate ERCOT is experiencing emergency conditions at this time,” the notice said. “Current forecasts are showing a potential to enter emergency operations this evening.”
ERCOT’s midday forecasts Thursday showed the state’s energy demand possibly exceeding supply around 7 p.m. and 8 p.m., which spurred San Antonio officials into action that afternoon. Around 2:35 p.m., city staff canceled an ongoing city budget work session to pull together an emergency press conference asking residents and local partners to immediately conserve energy and to prepare for probable outages.
After hours of waiting to see if grid officials would call for local brownouts, ERCOT said in an 8:35 p.m. social media post that its energy conservation request, first issued at noon Thursday, would end at 10 p.m. statewide.
In a social media post Friday, ERCOT said it was able to avoid potential emergency operations on Thursday “due to conservation by Texas residents & businesses, Houston-area rain, increased wind, & additional reliability tools.”
ERCOT said “continued low wind-power generation and high demand” are behind Friday’s conservation request. It’s latest grid forecast again shows the space between demand and supply will be tight Friday evening.
However, ERCOT data showed Texas’ natural gas and coal generation were also underperforming as of Friday afternoon.
ERCOT has seen record demand this summer, driven both by intense heat and a growing population. Renewables, especially solar, have helped the Texas grid stay afloat this summer by allowing the grid operator to meet increasing demand.
When only wind generation or coal and natural gas generation is down in Texas, the grid is still able to handle demand pretty well, Michael Webber, professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin, told the San Antonio Report on Thursday — but not when both are struggling.
“We had [coal and natural gas] power plants offline with outages and low winds [Thursday], and those are Texas’ workhorses,” Webber said. “If one of those is not good we are OK, but if both are offline we have real problems.”
Webber said he’d love to see the state utilize tools like a statewide demand response program — similar to the one CPS Energy has in place — and also more battery storage for Texas in the near future.
CPS Energy issued a statement just before 2 p.m. Friday to “remind the community that we are still under an ERCOT Weather Watch through Sunday, August 27, 2023.”
The municipally owned utility also thanked San Antonio residents for their conservation efforts Thursday — CPS Energy said city-wide conservation efforts saved roughly 230 megawatts — and asked them to do so again Friday. San Antonio residents can see CPS Energy’s tips on how to conserve energy here.
ERCOT set a new unofficial peak demand record of 85,435 megawatts on Aug. 10 — the 10th record it has set this summer. Last summer, ERCOT set 11 peak demand records with a high of 80,148 megawatts. One megawatt is enough to power 200 Texas homes on a hot day.
Earlier this summer, Pablo Vegas, ERCOT’s president and CEO, told San Antonio reporters it’s “very possible” that Texas will continue to break energy demand records this summer, but said he was not particularly concerned about being able to meet that demand. ERCOT has up to 97,000 megawatts of resource capacity available for peak summer load, according to its summer 2023 Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy.
