Texas eyes a Texas-sized role for DERs

The ERCOT board voted unanimously on October 18 to approve a pilot 80 MW “virtual power plant.” Lots of tiny resources, in this case mostly solar panels and batteries, will add up to a large amount that will help with grid reliability and resiliency.

I first wrote about the pilot in May after the Commission invited comments. They subsequently established a Distributed Energy Resource Task Force which has met many times over the last several months and doggedly ironed out differences to reach a compromise, which is notably twice as large as first proposed. The commission will likely vote to approve the pilot on November 3.

For the latest episode of the Texas Power Podcast, I talked with Amy Heart, VP of Public Policy at Sunrun and member of the PUC’s DER Task Force. Sunrun is the largest residential solar installer in the US and has grown its Texas business significantly after Winter Storm Uri. We talked about how much the market has changed, what are the biggest barriers to solar and storage installations, and about her work on the Task Force.

While the pilot is a massive step forward, it is only the beginning. It is small relative to the size even of the existing DER market (~3GW), not to mention the current exponential growth accelerated by persistent worry about the fragility of the ERCOT grid. Commissioner McAdams, who led the creation of the task force and the pilot, reported in a memo earlier this year that there are nearly 3000MW of DERs in ERCOT, with 25% of those installed in 2021.

Assuming a similar growth rate in 2022, the 80MW pilot brings in only about 2% of the existing installed base. But, as with all things, you’ve got to start somewhere and this is an excellent start. All involved, including the commissioners, recognize that the point is to get some lessons learned in order to expand the number of DERs participating in the ERCOT market…