Governor Abbott’s letter to the PUC will actually make Texas electricity costlier and less reliable, while skewing the playing field to favor aging thermal power plants over new renewables. Here’s why… 🧵
texastribune.org/2021/07/06/tex…
1. Abbott wants subsidies for development & maintenance of coal, nuclear & gas plants. But no one wants to build costly new coal & nuclear. Better maintenance is indeed needed as thermal plants suffer 3x expected outages; that’s a cost of doing business, not cause for subsidies.
2. Abbott also asks PUC to impose new costs on wind and solar. But those are what developers want to build because they’re the cheapest and cleanest options, and corporate consumers are increasingly demanding clean electricity.
3. Legislation that Abbott just signed, dubiously claiming it fixed all of ERCOT’s woes, explicitly chose not to saddle wind and solar with new costs. Abbott’s letter reverses that.
4. Abbott’s letter also calls for more transmission. Yes, we need that. But Abbott wants it only to connect thermal plants. What’s needed is new lines connecting what’s growing — supply from wind and solar, and demand from cities and industries.
5. Reliability requires all power sources to function as a team. Wind & solar provide cheap clean power when it’s windy & sunny, nuclear a fixed supply, and fossils flex to cover variable demand. Trouble comes when nuclear or fossils stumble while winds are slow or demand high.
6. Abbott can’t overrule economics. Wind & solar are cheap and sought by consumers; new coal & nuclear are prohibitively costly. We need a serious plan to integrate more variable renewables, bolster transmission, and make demand more efficient & flexible, not political posturing.
7. Yes, balancing variable renewables is a challenge. Yes, we still need nuclear & gas for now, with better maintenance of old plants and perhaps new peakers. But blending complementary renewables and adding transmission & storage eases the burden.
jrenewables.springeropen.com/articles/10.11…
8. Abbott’s blunder doesn’t boost the economy at the expense of the environment — it hurts both. No one wants more coal, wind & solar bring jobs & revenue to rural counties, and industries (including oil & gas!) seek cleaner, cheaper, more reliable power to run their operations.

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More from @cohan_ds

8 Jul
Why ERCOT had a close call June 14-16:
1. Demand high for June (70 GW; T in 90s), but not for summer peak (expected ~77 GW, or 80+GW in heat wave)
2. Winds very slow
3. Thermal power plant outages higher than expected (~15% of 64 GW fleet) throughout month
4. Solar kept lights on Thermal and total unplanned resource outages in ERCOT, June Electricity demand in ERCOT, June 2021, from EIA Hourly GridERCOT power output by source, from EIA Hourly Grid Monitor
ERCOT's summer assessment of resource adequacy unrealistically expects to get 95% output from its 64 GW thermal fleet during summer peak demand. But outages have stayed ~10-15+%, and output is often below 90% even at plants that don't report outages.
As I noted here, 20 GW of ERCOT's 64 GW thermal + hydro fleet is >40 years old, and 30 GW is >30 years old. Expecting 95% output from it when we need it most seems like wishful thinking, especially given recent levels of outages.
Read 8 tweets
16 Jun
ERCOT debuted "extreme scenarios" in its summer SARA, but downplayed them without justification as "1-in-100" events. In fact, power plant outages are double their worst case and wind output low. Solar has saved us this week, but the grid seems unready for an August heat wave.
It also seems erroneous to call Uri a one-in-100 event, as shown in this research by my colleague Prof. James Doss-Gollin @jdossgollin
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…
cee.rice.edu/news/was-febru…
So far, demand hasn't topped 70 GW (and fortunately stayed below forecasts today), but it could reach 80 GW in an August heat wave. We'll need most power plants back online and perhaps a few new solar farms to handle that.
Read 5 tweets
13 Jun
Solar keeping the lights on in ERCOT today. Unusually tight and pricy for a warm but unexceptional June weekend afternoon, with winds slow. ImageImageImage
I’m seeing tweets of brief power outages in parts of Texas today as supply got tight and prices spiked. Does anyone have details on that?
Potential projected capacity shortage Monday, June 14 Image
Read 4 tweets
13 Apr
Back near $2,000/MWh on a mild spring day, with many of our power plants down for maintenance
Awfully tight for a mild spring day
Power plant outages have remained high since the February blackouts
ercot.com/content/wcm/ke…
Read 9 tweets
30 Mar
Article leads with two companies that went bust, before eventually noting that DOE loan guarantees netted a $2B profit, funded Tesla and other successes, and brought down the costs of solar, wind, and EVs. Sounds like a success to me. nytimes.com/2021/03/29/cli…
So Obama’s program netted $2B, helped turn wind and solar into thriving industries, boosted Tesla and EVs, and created jobs, but it's called "not particularly effective?” Sounds like a success worth emulating, rather than focusing on “Solyndra syndrome” yet again.
So the bill “didn’t have a big impact,” but it made it “cheaper to reduce emissions,” “created political support for doing so,” and “gave a jolt to EV manufacturing”?? Sounds like Dems are right to “go bigger — much bigger,” rather than get hung up on “Solyndra syndrome.”
Read 4 tweets
17 Feb
So many of the misleading narratives about the #TexasBlackout are missing a fundamental understanding of our electric power supply, and its mutual vulnerabilities with our gas systems. We're facing an _energy systems_ crisis, not just an electricity crisis.
To understand why, we can begin by seeing how ERCOT generates power on average. Nearly half is from gas. Wind topped coal last year for the first time. We have just 4 nuclear units, little hydro, and solar soaring from a small base.
That supply provides power for most but not all of the state. And the grid is contained within Texas, with very little transmission linking to the rest of the country or Mexico. So what happens in Texas, stays in Texas.
Read 31 tweets

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