The Texas power grid has faced enormous criticism since Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which left millions without power, and ended with hundreds of people dead. Since then, there has been a lot of pomp and circumstance presented by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in making the grid better, and tons of bravado saying the grid is far improved and better prepared for another chaotic event.
But one expert at the University of Houston, energy fellow Ed Hirs, warns that may not be the case. In fact, he says that the Texas grid is more vulnerable at this moment than it was during the rolling blackouts in 2021's winter event.
Hirs says the weak link in this ERCOT chain is them being an electricity-only market, where producers only make their money if they are contributing to the grid. For power plants, which provide reliability, that is almost never.
"About 30 percent of plants do not operate but two months of the year, during those peak times," he says. "So, it does not tempt the owners to keep these plants available to the grid."
Recently, ERCOT projected there is an 80-percent likelihood of rolling blackouts if the state is hit with another Winter Storm Uri type of event. Compared that to 2021, when they projected only a 50 percent chance of blackouts leading up to Uri.
Their big 'solution' in the last three years has been touting more wind and solar energy, which helped none during 2021. The simpler idea, according to Hirs, would be to build more power plants.
"We have a lot of wind and solar, but not a lot of long duration batteries...eventually we will get there. But in the meantime, we are just playing ERCOT weather roulette," he says.
But even that has a roadblock because ERCOT's biggest problem is possibly the structure of itself. It is all about money to be made.
"They are a 100 percent government operated entity, it is an arm of the state...it is exactly like an old-style Soviet purchasing bureau," he says. "It does not reward capital investment, so as a result, no one is building power plants."
Subsidies have played a major role in keeping the grid at a total stalemate of progress. Texas politicians have subsidized all forms of electric generation dating back to 2021, costing Texans about $17 billion a year.
Hirs adds that the state is taking advantage of Texans, and they are avoiding the simple solutions because it would hurt too many pocketbooks.