Got Them Old Electric Blues Again, Mama!

NEW and 👀 from @MitchellFerman: @ERCOT_ISO told a power plant to delay repairs ahead of a May heat wave. It was among six that crashed https://t.co/VIAoKBQ3hb #txlege #tx2022

— Evan Smith (@evanasmith) May 17, 2022

Chuck Todd said last Sunday that midterms are usually decided by May, because voter sentiment is locked in by then. Looks like we’re going to put that theory to the test:

On Thursday, Texas’ power grid operator told at least one power plant to delay its scheduled repairs and keep operating to help meet demand during hotter-than-expected May weather.

The next day, the plant went offline anyway when some of its equipment stopped working properly, according to energy giant Calpine, which owns the plant. Calpine declined to identify the plant.

By just after 5 p.m. Friday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas announced that six power plants had gone down unexpectedly and asked Texans to turn up their thermostats to 78 degrees for the weekend and avoid using large appliances during the hottest hours of the day to reduce strain on the power grid.

No, it wasn't February 2021 all over again.  But it's not August, yet.  It has been unusually warm for May.  But the norm in Texas summers is 90-100 during the day, and not much below 78 at the coolest at night .  That kind of heat builds over the summer.  I had a book explaining Texas to non-Texans, and it included a visual representation of Texas weather.  It was a map of Texas on fire.  That was "Spring".  The fire progressed through Summer, and in August the map was fully engulfed.  "Winter" was the burnt map, extinguished.

That's about right.

So August is our February, but for heat rather than cold.  And where February can be mild, even for a Texas winter, August is always ungodly hot, and only like to be hotter with such an early start to the hot season down here.  Whatever hand-waving Abbott and the GOP did in the last session to make the Great Freeze go away, isn't working for the summer.

Richmond said ERCOT is “taking a top-down approach” in determining when to tell companies to delay needed repairs and “doesn’t take into account what these complex machines need to make sure they get maintenance done.”

“When you start to tell generators during the season they’re supposed to be doing maintenance that they can’t, then you’re trying to squeeze more out of plants than what is safe and reliable,” she added.

ERCOT approves planned maintenance requests from energy companies months and even years in advance because of the complexity of the work and the need to maintain a minimum level of generation capacity at all times.

Over recent weeks, portable toilets, tents and large cargo containers have been assembled at power plants across Texas for repair crews that allow the facilities to run at full strength during the hot Texas summer.

Dozens of contract workers at many sites erect scaffolding — some even bring in cranes to move heavier equipment — and take apart the plants’ turbines and fix rotating blades. Depending on the scope of the work, a plant can be down for days or weeks.

“Our companies want to be on in the heat of summer, our companies want to be on when customers need us to provide power,” Richmond said. “We also want to do it reliably and safely. Part of reliability of a power plant is taking scheduled maintenance to not only run safely but run at max performance, just like you don’t want to do maintenance on your car when you’re on a cross-country road trip.” 

So we're all about to go on summer vacation and we can't get the family car readided for the trip, which means it will probably breakdown somewhere in the desert between Central Texas and California (hint: that's almost all desert), with few places to get repairs done.  But it's okay, the Lege prepared for that, too:

The Public Utility Commission of Texas, which is in charge of ERCOT, is considering a new rule that could shorten the maintenance season when plants can go offline for repairs. The new rule is based on a provision in Senate Bill 3, the state Legislature’s response to last year’s freeze, when millions of people were without power for days in subfreezing temperatures and hundreds died after a combination of cold weather and skyrocketing energy demand shut down power plants as well as the natural gas facilities that supply them with fuel.

Richmond said the new rule is flawed because it doesn’t outline specific metrics to tell ERCOT when a plant needs maintenance, which she said could be a problem with a shorter maintenance season.

Officials from multiple power companies contacted by the Tribune this week questioned whether the rule would give them enough time to make necessary repairs during maintenance season because there are a limited number of qualified repair crews and they travel the country repairing power plants during the milder months of the year. The companies asked not to be identified because power plant outage details have not yet been publicly disclosed by ERCOT. 

The sensible solution to this mess would be to put Texas on the national power grids.  Some parts of it, at the geographical fringes, are.  Most of Texas is on the Texas grid.  An aging grid designed for a much lower population using much less electricity. (Our genius political leaders encouraged crypto currency “miners” to set up servers here. How’s that gonna work out now? More electricity consumption for worthless fake coins?)

We'll see how that all works out between now and November.  Which, ironically enough, is about the time it actually starts to cool down in Texas. No, I'm not kidding.

Could be a very long summer indeed for Greg Abbott.