Comment by nonethewiser
2 years ago
What's stopping power companies from ramping up energy production? They know in advance there will be problems. What stopping them from just producing more? I realize there are some peculiarities of the Texas grid, but this is obviously a problem beyond Texas, as California and east coast has blackouts as well. I'm asking about all these cases.
I imagine maybe this requires some additional infrastructure that simply doesn't exist. If so, what's the barrier to building this infrastructure?
Permitting and transmission lines.
There's a queue of companies who want to build power plants in Texas, but can't because the lines aren't there. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/25/texas-renewable-ener...
When you're already running at full tilt, how are you going to ramp up energy production? You then need to build more.
Building and connecting takes time. Texas has added several state's worth of energy to the grid in the past few years. The peak hit at the 2021 winter storm was 76GW, far higher than any normal time historically. This summer, just two years later, Texas is going >85GW of power demand every day.
For comparison, New York's projected peak demand is only 32GW for this summer. So Texas' demand grew by an additional 1/3 of New York's entire demand in just 2 years. That's a massive amount of growth!
https://dps.ny.gov/summer-energy-outlook
So essentially its high growth in energy demand? And probably it not making sense financially to overbuild.
The demand is there, the building is there, but if you overbuild you can get screwed very hard, so the power companies have (very complex, mind you) models that they use to determine if a plant will make sense to bring online.
Those models may have been wrong, or based on assumptions about temperatures that turned out incorrect.
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High growth in demand due to increasing temperatures. This summer is likely exceptional, due to El Nino, but it won't be the last one, and the base temperature will continue to rise due to climate change.
So this was foreseeable, but unforeseen because they didn't wish to. And it will continue to happen, and worse.
> If so, what's the barrier to building this infrastructure?
Tons of money, and time?
Texas grid is over 100GW, they're saying they have a 7% increase in demand? So figure like 5-10GW?
They just spent $10 billion on 10GW of new power plants, and those take 5-10 years to come online. (And the estimate is it'll overrun to $18 billion)
They're already incentivized to do this because the price varies with demand. Providers that can vary their output (at least some natural gas and coal sources) already do this on a daily basis, which you can see here: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix
The overnight low price is typically $20-$30/MWh. Yesterday during the shortage the price peaked at $5000/MWh, which I suspect might be an upper limit.