Pacific gas and electric outages map1/17/2024 “On most of our days, we’re getting close to 20 percent or more from renewables, particularly at peak,” Silverstein said. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator serving most of the state, issued its first voluntary conservation notice of the year Tuesday.ĮRCOT did not reach emergency conditions last week. The recent heat wave arrived against that backdrop, with solar coming to the rescue as temperatures across the state rose. The bill passed the Senate, but ultimately died in the House. This year, Republican lawmakers passed a bill designed to encourage the build-out of natural gas and pushed legislation that would have made it harder to pass permits and connect renewable facilities to the grid. Power plants farther north fared much better, even though they experienced colder temperatures.īut that has done little to quell the political debate. Texas power plants and gas infrastructure are simply not winterized to withstand extreme cold, a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report found. The debate often has failed to reflect the real cause of the outages. Democrats and environmentalists pointed to failures at gas plants and the pipelines that serve them. Republicans and fossil fuel interests sought to blame renewables. Texas’ grid has been at the center of national debate over the country’s transition to cleaner electricity sources, pitting the need to reduce planet-warming pollution against the necessity of keeping on the lights.Ī powerful winter storm in 2021 led to widespread power outages in much of Texas. "We cannot change our built infrastructure fast enough.” “This kind of heat dome and long-lasting extreme heat conditions are not anything we have seen before in Texas, and yet they are happening more and more often," Silverstein added. “We learned that climate change isn’t messing around,” said Alison Silverstein, a Texas-based energy consultant who authored a high-profile Department of Energy report on the reliability of the country’s electric system in 2018. The broiling conditions are expected to continue this week. The current heat wave has shattered temperature records in many cities and reached as high as 118 degrees Fahrenheit along the Mexican border. The last few days have offered a preview of this hotter future. Yet, in spite of the sun-powered boost, analysts say the state’s electric grid remains unprepared for a warming climate where intense heat waves will become more frequent and severe. So it goes in Texas, where a surge in solar power generation is helping the state’s primary grid operator navigate an ongoing and stifling heat wave. CLIMATEWIRE | Live by the sun, die by the sun.
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