Yeah, it's May. And it's shaping up to be one of those weird Mays, where it's not pretty, temperate, and a gentle transition into my most dreaded of seasons - Summer.

Oh, noes - not hardly.

Here in Pcola, we've gone from a below-average temp April (it averaged four degrees cooler than last year) to a dry, blistering ten days of May as abruptly as if someone had hit a proverbial on-off switch. I am delighted my a/c guys found that funky capacitor and changed it out when they were here a couple of weeks ago for the tune-up, as that sucker is getting a workout already.

Sitting here parched and toasty while parts of Texas have been super wet. Dangerously unstable systems marching across the state and through the plains have been dumping boatloads of water and spawning astonishing amounts of really nasty tornadic activity.  Part of what's feeding those supercells is the warm Gulf moisture meeting those cold fronts - the clash intensifies when it's really hot, and it has been.

ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) is the organization that manages the flow of electricity to over 26M Texas customers.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million Texas customers -- representing about 90 percent of the state’s electric load. As the independent system operator for the region, ERCOT schedules power on an electric grid that connects more than 54,100 miles of transmission lines and 1,250 generation units, including Private Use Networks. It also performs financial settlement for the competitive wholesale bulk-power market and administers retail switching for 8 million premises in competitive choice areas. ERCOT is a membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. Its members include consumers, cooperatives, generators, power marketers, retail electric providers, investor-owned electric utilities, transmission and distribution providers and municipally owned electric utilities.

Last night, the 8th of May, ERCOT had itself a bit of an early season scare when temps hit 90°+ across the state.

TXANS Update—5/8/24: An ERCOT Weather Watch is in effect today due to unseasonably high temperatures, high levels of expected maintenance outages during the spring shoulder months, and the potential for lower reserves. Grid conditions are expected to be normal. A Weather Watch…

— ERCOT (@ERCOT_ISO) May 8, 2024

It's fascinating to watch last evening's drama play out in the energy charts. The squeeze time for usage was predicted to be between 7 and 9 pm, which makes perfect sense, doesn't it? People are home, a/c's are running, dinners are being cooked, TVs are on, or homework/whatever is being done. People have stuff to finish up before hitting the sack.

Those are the busiest hours of the evening, when most people are inside and, of course, they want to be comfortable plus get the house cooled down enough to sleep well.

Grid watchers were expecting a conservation call as usage climbed uncomfortably close to available capacity.

Demand forecast is now higher than committed capacity forecast but lower than "available capacity" by 650 megawatts. They roll outages at 1000MW. It's going to be extremely tight. Confused about what criteria ERCOT is using for conservation calls. #txlege #txenergy https://t.co/37yV5k6WaP pic.twitter.com/vPEiUkU4cy

— Doug Lewin (@douglewinenergy) May 8, 2024

A good part of the capacity squeeze was the wind dropping off, but also, thanks to plants and facilities being offline for maintenance during the increasingly small window operators feel safe they have the opportunity to get such things done. 

ERCOT’s Weather Watch will soon expire. But I had questions about why it was issued in the first place.

Mainly, if we’re getting this NOW — in May — what’s going to happen this summer?

Energy experts helped me break down the factors at play here ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/7ZlfacpikJ

— Grace Reader (@GraceReaderTV) May 9, 2024

Gas plants kicked in to pick up the load, plus ERCOT's battery storage helped to save the evening from a conservation call or worse - rolling blackouts.

At the peak batteries were serving 5.1% of load — an all-time record based on our trackinghttps://t.co/MjKsOuglkd pic.twitter.com/jxwZbHCBKM

— Grid Status (@grid_status) May 9, 2024

ERCOT squeaked through the evening by the hair of their chinny chin chin. They let the Weather Warning die a natural death at midnight without ever issuing any conservation calls to customers.

ERCOT made it through tonight without a conservation appeal, despite a fairly narrow gap between power demand vs. committed supply.

As has happened repeatedly, demand was ultimately significantly below ERCOT's forecasts. Batteries easily set a new record for grid contributions. https://t.co/61MfZdD0pF

— Claire Hao (@clairehao_) May 9, 2024

What's going to hurt is what the unexpected and unfortunate hot weather did to the price of electricity. That soared in concert with the thermometer.

OUCH

Texas electricity prices soared almost 100-fold as a high number of power-plant outages raised concerns of a potential evening shortfall.

Spot prices at the North Hub, which includes Dallas, jumped to more than $3,000 a megawatt-hour just before 7 p.m. local time, versus about $32 at the same time Tuesday, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

This morning, Ercot, as the state’s main grid operator is known, issued a “watch” for a potential capacity reserve shortage from about 7-9 p.m., meaning the buffer of spare supplies could fall to low enough levels to call on back-up generation, cancel or delay outages or curb usage.

The conditions are the tightest of the year so far and raises the risk of prices rising to the $5,000 cap — which they last did on April 16, when Ercot also warned of a potential shortfall. Unusually hot weather in the region has boosted demand for cooling and lowered the efficiency of many power plants. Wind output has also fallen from a day earlier and there are more outages.

The way TX household electricity bills are structured, according to Bloomberg, you have to pick a third-party provider, and then you have an option to lock in a KW rate for X-amount of months or even years in some instances. It seems really complicated to me, but I guess it's a function of the TX market being "deregulated" while trying to protect consumers to some extent from these massive surges at the same time. Particularly after word of some of the amounts on bills received by customers after the spikes during 2021's Winter Storm Uri's debacle.

These were the electric bills of legend while freezing your tookus off.

Updated Griddy bill! 1300 sq ft. Heat set at 60, no laundry, no running dishwasher, no stove/oven cooking, only used air fryer , lights off during the day candles at night most of the time , Tv on some. Some how they say I used 1772 khw. $5,000 @wfaa @FOX4 pic.twitter.com/r1eidadyur

— kat and tony (@katandtonyT) February 20, 2021

It looks like Texas has three rate tiers available to consumers. The explanation I have below is basically the same one I saw on every electrical provider's website. 

Another factor that affects Texas electricity rates is the type of plan you sign up for. Here are the three basic electricity plans currently available in the Lonestar State. 

Fixed-rate plans are the most common type of electricity plan in Texas. This type of plan is similar to how a fixed-rate mortgage works. The rate you initially sign up for when you start your plan is the rate you'll have at the end of your plan, regardless of what the energy market does. You can sign up for fixed-rate plans for as little as 3 to sometimes as high as 60 months at a time, and you can rest assured that your energy rate won't change. 

However, there's a chance that the rate will change when your contract ends and you re-enroll or find a new plan. 

Variable-rate plans are the exact opposite of fixed-rate ones. With variable-rate plans, you never know what your electricity rate will be from month to month. The rate won't change in the middle of the month, but it's liable to go up or down at the end of the month, depending on the energy market. 

Luckily, you can opt out of your variable-rate plan at the end of each month. The downside is that you might be scrambling to find a new electricity plan if you didn't plan ahead. 

The prepaid plan is the final type of electricity plan we'll discuss. With prepaid plans, you pay for electricity at the start of each month before you use it. If you go over the allotted amount, similar to using too much data on your phone plan, you'll have to contact your power company and purchase more. The downside of prepaid plans is that they often have higher rates and charge a fee if you go over your allotted electricity usage. 

There's not enough energy capacity available for the a/c it's gonna take to cool off those market prices.

Our Texas power grid right now

And it's May~ pic.twitter.com/lqKVFqZ5lO

— TruthInBytes (@bytesintruth) May 8, 2024

While the spot market shock comes and goes, higher rates and less reliable power never seem out of the picture for Texans. It's a continuing "what next?" Some of the decisions are so baffling.

...However, having enough capacity to meet increased demand may pose problems this time around. Over 1 million people have moved to the Lone Star State between 2021 and 2024, including over 470,000 in 2023 alone, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, power capacity has not kept up.

"Demand on the ERCOT grid has grown significantly over the last 3 years, and the natural gas and coal and nuclear power plants have not grown," said Hirs. "That fleet actually has diminished in size."

ERCOT attempted to bring more capacity into the grid in October, when it asked operators to reactivate older, retired power plants. The agency was seeking 3,000 megawatts of increased capacity but walked back its plan in November, when a meager 11.1 total megawatts were made available.

The plants were in such decrepit shape, there was no way operators could turn them on for ERCOT. Plus, it drives the prices much higher by virtue of scarcity when they are called upon for back-up with what they do have available, so where's the incentive to modernize and run those old plants?

...Texas has grown increasingly reliant on wind and solar energy to close the gap between demand and supply. Winter weather, however, poses challenges since wind and solar plants are more vulnerable to damage from frozen precipitation.

Meanwhile, last June, ERCOT instituted what it calls the "Contingency Reserve Service," which created power reserves that could come online quickly in order to stabilize the grid in times of high demand, such as during last summer's unrelenting heat wave. However, it did so by simply removing electricity generation from the grid that would have ordinarily been in the regular market and setting it aside, in case of emergency. By sidelining a portion of available grid capacity, ERCOT decreased the supply available to consumers while demand continued to grow, driving prices up by an estimated $8 billion dollars over the course of the summer, according to ERCOT's Independent Market Monitor. By the end of 2023, it estimated Texan consumers had been overcharged by a total of $12.5 billion since mid-June.

Texas has allowed itself to become reliant on the unreliable - wind and solar. The wind dropped off last night, causing a good portion of the yips about capacity.

And their answer to a reserve for capacity was to take generation off the grid, instead of adding new, reliable sources - natgas, nuclear - of electricity generation? NTM totally boning the Texas consumer without a second thought?

There's also a question about reliance on these batteries. Yeah, they saved the day last night, but at what cost to both the grid and TX consumer if ERCOT keeps trending in that direction instead of bolstering, say, their liquid natural gas (LNG) backups?

There was a hugely interesting blurb I read today concerning the fight to build LNG storage tanks next to power stations. It's an effort to prevent both the emergency price shocks as well as generation interruptions seen when conditions, winter or otherwise, cause disruptions that call for "just in time" deliveries to keep plants operational. Some East Coast plants are in the process of putting in as large as 25M gal LNG tanks to keep them humming long. On the other hand, climate cultists (aka Union of Concerned Scientists™) are insisting that those shortfalls can be made up with the usual renewables and unreliable suspects - wind, solar, etc., and battery storage.

What was new to me was the cost differential. Holy smokes.

...Despite the obvious benefits of building LNG storage facilities to store fuel on-site and derisk much of the nation’s power plant capacity from dependence on just-in-time fuel delivery, a January 2024 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) claims that onsite fuel storage for natural gas plants is not the answer.

Instead, UCS argues for more solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, geothermal, hydropower, transmission, and battery storage. But running some numbers on the cost to store LNG onsite compared to building an equivalent amount of energy storage capacity with batteries shows lithium-ion batteries are 141 times more expensive to build LNG storage facilities.

...According to company filings with the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), the facility will be able to fully power the 285 MW facility for five days, running 24 hours per day. This means that the facility will have 34,200-megawatt hours (MWh) of storage capacity at a cost of $2,339 per MWh, which amounts to $2.34 per kilowatt hour (kWh).

Battery cost data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Assumptions to the Annual Energy Outlook shows a cost of $1,316 per kilowatt of four-hour battery storage. Dividing this value by four gives us a cost of $329 per kWh of storage capacity, which translates into $329,000 per MWh.

This means that building enough battery storage capacity to provide five days of electricity would cost a cool $11.25 billion, 141 times more expensive than the proposed LNG storage facility at Astoria Station and three times more than the company’s entire market capitalization.

 That sure seems like it might be a viable option. Plus, LNG disposes of itself as it burns. What happens to all those batteries when they eventually poop out?

I mean, here we go again with the lithium recycling problem.

Basically, it boils down to: the Texas grid can't handle too hot, and it can't handle too cold. It's already "too hot."

And it's only May?

What's it going to take for Goldilocks to get it "just right"?

There's a question without a good answer.