Comment by vel0city
2 years ago
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!
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.
From the incentives, having blackouts is more financially desirable than overbuilding. This situation isn’t surprising.
It sucks if you’re like, you know, a person living there, but in terms of finance incentives, it’s close to the best possible outcome, right?
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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.