Energy volatility has emerged as an issue since the winter storm last February took out power for a large percentage of Texans and caused hundreds of deaths and billions in damage.
A new article shows that energy executives from the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc. (MISO) do not see a solution to the system volatility that some believe was caused by the surge in renewable energy, according to RTO Insider.
“We face a rapidly transforming energy landscape," MISO CEO John Bear said, RTO Insider reported.
Bear compared the load-supply balance to what it was 12 years ago.
“Load was the only thing that was moving around. Everything else was pretty static and predictable,” Bear said, according to RTO Insider. “Where we stand is not sustainable, and it’s not safe. We have a lot of work in front of us.”
Some believe reliance on the weather is to blame for these problems.
"Because energy generation fluctuates with weather, you do not want to be solely focused on building energy projects that depend entirely on the weather," Bill Peacock, director of the Energy Alliance, said, according to the Austin Journal. "This does nothing but exacerbate the issue."
Wayne Schug, MISO’s vice president of strategy and business development, claims an increasing renewables fleet and quickly changing weather is creating instability and an “inability to deal with" that instability. Staff predicts that as of 2030, 57% of the RTO’s fleet will be dispatchable. Dispatchable resources comprised 84% of the fleet in 2020. Schug said that in the past five years, average daily output changes and forecasting mistakes have increased by gigawatts and percentages points, respectively.
He asserted that the grid operator had improved at output forecasting, but the growing wind fleet has counteracted the progress in that area.
“I caution you about averages,” Schug said, RTO Insider reported. “Our extremes are much higher.”
Demonstrating the instability of the wind fleet, there were three days in 2020 where the wind output was zero.
“We’re seeing a lot more output and volatility on the wind side," MISO Independent Market Monitor David Patton said of those numbers.
Patton went on to say that it was difficult to meet goals for energy generation and expects that this will only become a bigger problem. Natural gas use might have made up for the decline in coal usage, but the price hikes for natural gas were too large. MISO nonetheless found better results than ERCOT during the February storms due to it being interconnected, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. They issued warnings in advance of rolling blackouts throughout the storm.