It appears that ERCOT is unwilling to do anything to improve their grid. No new power sources, no rebuilt sources, and no changes to the delivery system. Spend. No. Money. That's the plan. I hope it works out for them.

...have made a lot of money available for new clean energy production.

Just sayin'.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-power-grid-batteries/




Jerks. No doubt for ideological reasons.

All emphasis added by Progree

ETA - nowhere in the article does it indicate what the energy storage capacity (MWH) of these batteries are. When looking at articles on battery projects, all's I've seen are 4 hour batteries -- i.e. enough MWH storage capacity to run at full MW power capacity for 4 hours, or, for example, half power for 8 hours, etc. With one experimental project that I know of with a 100 hour battery made with different technology.

... battery storage might make sense for a local outage of only a couple of days, but it just is not enough. And wind represents only about 27% of electric generation in Texas.

In August 2019, the Texas electric grid reached a peak demand of 74,820 MW – the highest value ever recorded. Similar peaks were reached in August 2020 and 2021, but the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had more generation capacity available to meet them.




Screw Abbott, ERCOT: connect to the national grid.

I kind of was thinking in a relative sense compared to what was there 3 years before.

I was an engineer in the generation supply and transmission supply planning departments at Xcel Energy (in Minnesota) and superintendent of operational planning, so I'm well aware of the size of grids and what 10,000 MW means -- To me that's the capacity of 10 Prairie Island nuclear plants (at the time 2 units of 500 MW each), nothing to sneeze at, and while a mere 1/7 of ERCOT's peak demand, it's hardly insignificant.

Although from the article it's "up to 10,000 MW by the end of 2024" and later in the article it said its unlikely to reach that level (by the end of 2024). And 4 hours (if these are 4 hour batteries) is not a lot of storage (whereas Prairie Island generates its capacity 24/7/365 with more than 90% capacity factor). And at any given moment, only a certain percentage of the battery's capacity is available, since batteries aren't kept at 100% charge waiting for some bad event to happen. So at any given moment some batteries will be partly or completely drawn down.

I wouldn't say the batteries are just useful for a "local" outage. They can help the grid as a whole recover from a plant tripping offline until there's time to get other generation going. (Hopefully there will be other generation offline that can be started and put online -- or already online whose output can be ramped up -- that's usually the case, but might not be the case in Texas during peak conditions).