Texas policymakers have consistently neglected demand side solutions. They talk about them but they haven’t done much of anything to reduce demand even though it’s been obvious to everyone paying attention that demand side solutions are necessary.

The latest example broke last week. ERCOT is trying to find 3,000 megawatts of “zombie power plants” to bring back from the dead. 

It’s clear that this isn’t adequate. The CEO of CPS Energy, the utility with several of the units ERCOT wants to bring back from the dead, said as much: “It’s been five years since we’ve run it. There’s no way we can bring it back in four months.”

Texans won’t have a reliable grid until leaders prioritize demand reductions at least as much as additional supply…

Did ERCOT’s actions lead to emergency conditions? And given these persistent grid problems, where do we go from here?

Things got a little tense on the Texas power grid last night. It looks like electricity could get tight again tonight and tomorrow — ERCOT has already issued another conservation call for this evening, though everyday Texans, unlike big businesses and crypto miners, won’t be paid for reducing their use.

Yesterday, ERCOT sent out its conservation call at 4:55 p.m. Then, at around 7:10 p.m., frequency — which must stay at or near 60Hz — dropped all the way below 59.8 hz in about 15 minutes. Were frequency to drop much lower and remain there, ERCOT would need to implement rolling outages to prevent the entire grid from collapsing.

It’s still unclear what caused frequency to drop this far, this fast — we’re hamstrung by ERCOT’s reluctance to share reliable, transparent information, and its insistence on blaming renewables for any issues remains a serious problem…

As I write, about 800,000 Texans are without power. The problems today are very different than those during Uri when there wasn’t enough gas or power to meet the sky high demand in the extreme cold. These outages are on the local distribution grid but that doesn’t mean policymakers, regulators, energy companies, and Texans are powerless to reduce their severity.

During his press conference yesterday, Governor Abbott said: “It’s important to remember that local outages are not a reason to say there is a problem with the power grid.” I know what he probably means and I hear this from people all the time, but it’s wrong. He likely means there aren’t problems at the transmission level, also called the bulk power grid, or the ERCOT grid. But the distribution level grid is still part of the grid. Local outages are still outages.