The Texas electric grid is not as reliable as it should be given its available generation capacity, said Bill Peacock, policy director of Energy Alliance.
"Years of Texas' leaders subsidizing less reliable, intermittent wind and solar generation have come at a cost to Texas consumers," Peacock said. "Texas' electric grid is nowhere near as reliable as it should be given available generation capacity. The more politicized the Texas' electricity market has become, particularly when it comes to pushing the New Green Deal, the less reliable the grid has proved to be."
The unwillingness of the political establishment to challenge the energy industry's push for wind and solar subsidies has negatively impacted the Texas grid, Peacock said in a recently published white paper.
According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), wind’s share of Texas’s electricity market has increased 10 times since 2007 with generation from dispatchable sources dropping by about 32%.
Data suggests that Texas’ recent expansion of and reliance on wind energy production is creating problems with the grid’s ability to meet peak demand. Research from the Energy Alliance points to where this new balance leads to decreased grid reliability. As Texas has shed capacity from more reliable sources while onboarding naturally intermittent ones, the grid increasingly comes to rely more on intermittent wind and solar to deliver the reserve capacity needed to meet peak demand events. Should the wind not blow enough during peak demand, the Texas grid faces reliability problems.
A little over a year ago, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a letter directing Texas’ Public Utility Commission (PUC) to take specific and immediate actions to ensure the reliability of electricity on the Texas grid, including to “[a]llocate reliability costs to generation resources that cannot guarantee their own availability, such as wind or solar power.” To date, the PUC has taken no action related to that subject.