Pretty interesting to see how this stuff is holding up. The market is evolving rapidly currently with absolutely massive amounts of wind, solar, and battery being deployed everywhere.
What's odd in Texas is that they are resisting the notion of connecting to the rest of the US grid. This would allow them to import power cheaply when they need to and export power when they have too much of it. My guess is that they actually curtail a lot of energy at this point because there's simply too much of it most of the time.
A quick glance at the main page of gridstatus.io shows that right now California and Texas are burning a lot of gas while there is negative pricing due to wind delivering over capacity in the states in between. They are literally paying people to consume more power there while they are paying for huge amounts of gas to be burnt in California and Texas. It's night time there of course so, solar is out.
What's preventing states from doing the obvious thing here? The mid west could be exporting power at a profit right now and instead it has negative power. And California could not be burning many tons of gas right now because there's a surplus of power right next to it.
Correction, the fat cats who own ERCOT don’t like that.
Your regular run of the mill Texan may not care one way or the other, most times. But if they get into a crunch where their electric bills are much higher, I assure you that they will care.
>ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,[11][12] and its members include consumers, electric cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities (transmission and distribution providers), and municipally owned electric utilities.[13]
You are uninformed. ERCOT is heavily influenced (“owned”) by Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) and market makers that are profit seeking entities. This is true of all ISOs for all intents and purposes. It is the primary reason why the U.S. grid is slow to innovate/change, e.g., implementing distributed generation participation in wholesale markets, etc.
I don't believe grid connections are the obvious and easy answer. That would assume those other grids do not have base loads plants themself. There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for. So while yes, there are periods of negative prices, the cost to run that plant 24/7 may be cheaper than turning it on and off and not just cheaper in $ but cheaper in less resources being used.
Negative pricing and "burning a lot of gas" are maybe not as bad as you think. As more wind/solar get added to the generation mix, there will be more peak times where prices may become negative. The lens I have is this means there is incentive for more storage to come on the grid to soak up those events and then offload at peak demand times.
> There is a massive cost to starting and stopping gas plants that you are also not accounting for
It's my understanding that basically the entire point of gas power plants is that they are very cheap to stop and start (as opposed to e.g. coal or nuclear), at least, that's the case in the UK - are these plants different in the US?
Your understanding is mostly wrong then. Modern combined-cycle turbines are more efficient but I would not call them cheap to stop and start. You are still looking at a 20-30min startup time and a similar cool-down period. So yes designed to be able to shutdown I think the general range is an on-time of 30-70% but I believe with those ranges you get different efficiency curves. You get increased wear, higher fuel cost and also need to predict that demand will not spike. When prices dip below zero it may be more cost effective to keep the plants online.
It's still expensive relative to batteries. If you think about it, a steam turbine has a lot of water that needs to be heated before you actually get any steam and a lot of heavy, moving parts that need to start spinning. Once all that is up and running it's fine and you just expend fuel to maintain the steam pressure.
But this takes a while. And to heat things up faster, you simply burn a massive amount of fuel; which is costly. And until you generate steam, it's not actually generating any power whatsoever.
Any thermal plant has this overhead that makes starting them expensive and stopping them undesirable because the shorter you run them, the more inefficient they get. You amortize the startup cost over the runtime. The longer it runs, the better it gets.
A battery provides power within milliseconds and it can switch from charging to discharging on a moment's notice as well. That's why batteries are displacing gas plants as peaker plants in a lot of places.
Pumped water storage or hydroplant can go from zero to 100 within tens of seconds. No degradation in storage capacity. Also greener than digging up all these rare earth metals although it still has an initial impact on the local eco system when you store water where it previously wasn't.
A gas power plant (specifically a peaker plant designed for this) is still more expensive to start or stop than a battery or hydro.
However, it is much more expensive to build the capacity for batteries and you need to charge the batteries with excess power that’s available cheaply during surplus times.
The advantage of a peaker gas plant is you can build it big and shovel fuel into it that you just brought over from wherever. Many of them were built with the expectation that they would not face competition from batteries, so the economics of running them is getting bad. However they’re still important as a backup because you cannot depend reliably on the batteries being charged.
Connecting your grid to other markets for the premise of cheaper energy also puts you in a situation where you no longer control your own destiny. My expectation is that the presumed gains of some cheaper power don't balance the risk on reliability and control.
I don't necessarily buy the argument but I am fairly certain that a big chunk of it.
As someone who very nearly lost a family member due to the state's complete inability to implement and enforce preparedness regulations, and due to ERCOT's herculean effort to do just barely not enough to keep the grid online... respectfully, fuck that argument.
We live in a time where functional electric service is a necessity for life. We also live in a time where extreme weather patterns are getting more frequent and more intense.
The very least Texas could do is implement the equipment and procedures necessary to enable importing power from the national grid in an emergency. The cost to implement interconnects at key locations is infinitesimal compared to the costs incurred when there are systemic outages.
The "we can do it better ourselves" argument only works when you don't repeatedly catastrophically fail at "doing it better."
You should also remember that actually having a more connected grid makes it susceptible to reliability issues as well. If you look back to 1999 when the entire northeast electrical grid was crippled for a couple weeks as a function of that connectivity.
I'm not letting Texas off the hook -- not winterizing your natural gas pipelines and trying to blame renewables for the grid catastrophically failing is definitely a regulators issue and a return a much money as possible to the investor shareholders without concern to the citizens is the key feature of their system.
Forgive my ignorance but doesn't connecting to other grid allow them to buy energy when prices are low and still allow them to generate their own when the national grid prices are high? It would also allow them to sell excess no?
It does but it appears the market unit for a block of energy does not match well with what is actually needed. So you might need 1-2 hours worth of extra power to hit peak demand but you have to buy 6 and dump the 4.
Depends on the needs of the market and their own generating supply. Arbitrage opportunities would surely exist in the short run while long run pushes the price to a natural equilibrium.
I recall from reading the blog, there are definitely issues in Texas with grid capacity between the west where the bulk of the solar is and the east where there is load, and people and other grids. So grid interconnects to other grids wouldn’t necessarily be enough, you have to get the power to the interconnect as well.
What's odd in Texas is that they are resisting the notion of connecting to the rest of the US grid. This would allow them to import power cheaply when they need to and export power when they have too much of it. My guess is that they actually curtail a lot of energy at this point because there's simply too much of it most of the time.
A quick glance at the main page of gridstatus.io shows that right now California and Texas are burning a lot of gas while there is negative pricing due to wind delivering over capacity in the states in between. They are literally paying people to consume more power there while they are paying for huge amounts of gas to be burnt in California and Texas. It's night time there of course so, solar is out.
What's preventing states from doing the obvious thing here? The mid west could be exporting power at a profit right now and instead it has negative power. And California could not be burning many tons of gas right now because there's a surplus of power right next to it.