![]() The only time energy demand has been higher than that in the winter was during last February’s storm.īut ERCOT’s forecasting has been off before. The gas market "still appears to be the Wild West," Silverstein told KUT last month.įorecasts are constantly changing, but the state’s grid operator - the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT - has said Texans could use over 70 gigawatts of power from the state grid at the peak of this week’s storm. While power plants have been "winterized," no such standards have yet been enacted by state oil and gas regulators at the Railroad Commission of Texas. Previous drops in gas supply during relatively mild cold fronts do not "bode well for the performance of the natural gas system in colder weather or for the performance of power plants that can't get gas because of freeze," said Alison Silverstein, an energy consultant who has formerly worked at both the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The performance of the state’s gas supply chain this week could tell us something about what work remains to be done to secure the gas supply. This year, energy experts have watched with concern as far milder cold snaps have again caused gas wells to stop producing and power plants to stop running. The drop in gas supply was a main factor in last year’s blackouts because, without natural gas, gas power plants can’t produce power. The 2021 blackout brought a lot of attention to the crucial role the state’s natural gas supply plays in keeping the power running in Texas. Do they hold up better than they had last year?" “They've been audited and visited by ERCOT. "How well do those coal and gas and nuclear power plants hold up after they've supposedly gone through checks of their winterization?" asks Cohan. Since last year’s blackout, state leaders have touted new regulations mandating that power plants “winterize” to be ready to perform in cold weather.ĭan Cohan, a professor of environmental engineering at Rice University, says this week may provide “the first real test” of those standards. Here are some things to keep an eye out for as cold grips the state: While a blackout appears unlikely, the performance of the grid this week could still teach us some things about how well energy companies and state regulators have or have not strengthened the grid since the last blackout. The relative weakness of this front compared to last year's is one reason officials are confident Texas will not suffer another statewide blackout. This event will be “nothing like that," he says. Temperatures in the single digits on the coldest nights, several rounds of wintry precipitation,” says Nick Hampshire with the National Weather Service. In 2021, "we saw below freezing temperatures for many, many, many days. ![]() Last year, Austin stayed below freezing for nearly a week straight. In Austin, for example, meteorologists are currently anticipating around 30 hours of uninterrupted freezing temperatures later this week. The cold will also not be as severe or last nearly as long. That means energy demand is expected to be significantly lower and power plants outside the range of the freeze are less likely to be affected. Unlike that storm, it will not cover the entire state. Currently, forecasters say a round of freezing precipitation is possible from North Texas to Austin followed by a day or two of below-freezing temperatures.īut, even though this type of storm is not seen every year, it is still a far cry from the February freeze of 2021. The cold weather so far this year has been called “boringly normal.” The front expected this week might not be. So how should we gauge the electric grid’s performance in what might be its first test since last winter?įirst, remember that this is a much weaker cold front But it will be unusually cold, and may bring icy weather to large swaths of Texas. This time around, energy experts and state officials are confident the freeze will not undo the state’s energy system. The winter weather expected to arrive in Texas on Wednesday has a lot of people thinking about last February’s blackout.
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