Hello, and welcome to the Texas Tribune trip Cast for February third, twenty twenty six. My name is Matthew Watkins, editor in chief of the Texas Tribune, and I am joined as usual by Law and Justice reporter Eleanor Klibanoff. Hello, Eleanor, thanks for having me.
It is still law in politics. I saw that written in the script. I decided not to fix it. Truly insane we are, I mean, I guess I'm only six months into this job, six months into this job of you not getting the title.
And part of it is I have to say it literally every other week, every other week, and yeah, I still got wrong. So in this case, I think I knew it. I just typed it poorly.
Sure, law on politics, I mean justice. You know it's in the it's in the name.
Yeah. And here also with us is Matt Baum's, executive director of the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance. He's an expert on the grid, renewed energy and it's an impact on the economy. Welcome Matt.
Thank you so much. Matt.
It's great to be here, great to have you. So the reason we are having Matt on is because we are about two weeks away from when news started coming down that sent tear across Texas. The news was of course that it was going to be cold outside, you know, and that brought you know, the normal Texas response. Grocery store shelves cleared, emergency provisions acquired, everyone sort of reliving their collective trauma from twenty twenty one. The weather, I mean,
I don't mean to downplay it too much. It had an impact. Roads were shut down across the state, Schools canceled in North Texas for you know, basically a week eleanor. I had a very interesting experience where I had a pre planned ski trip, so I was actually in Colorado working the Sunday on call shift, you know, responding to the weather. It was negative four degrees outside where I was,
and like a literal blizzard going on. While I was checking in on my colleagues where it was you know, like twenty seven degrees, and we were.
Like, it's all over for us.
Shut it down.
It is funny. It's like, you know, water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink exactly exactly, yeah, we do not. I will say the number of meetings we had to plan and prepare for this cold spell. I think it was more than we have to prepare for, like the election we have upcoming, like Texans stay ready for cold weather.
Matter. Are you from.
Texas now, I'm not originally Matt, I'm adopted. I'm an adopted Texan.
Okay are you Are you from a colder climate?
I am? Yeah. So for me, this is like, you know, not normal, but certainly something that we're used to. But I think that we're all dealing with PTSD from winter storm URI, right, Like a lot of the kind of news attention, I think people's general anxiety stems from that shared trauma that we all have back in twenty twenty one. So I think I really do think that plays a
big role as far as the news cycle. But we can get into the details of kind of what went down over the weekend and how the storm was a little bit different.
Yep.
That's that's exactly right, And I think that's sort of the topic we want to talk about as well, right, because we did have what you would sort of describe as normal winter storm chaos, which is you know, ice, maybe some tree limbs on the line, power lines causing you know, sporadic localized outages and rows being frozen over.
But the question, I think the thing that sends people rushing to the grocery store is that collective trauma that twenty twenty one power outage where you know, the grid almost failed and brought you know, the largest sort of rolling blackout situation in our country's history, and we managed to avoid that at this time, and it has raised the question that I think we want to sort of make be the topic of this podcast, which is have they fixed the grid? Does this mean that our days
of a tenuous grid are over? Have we solved the problem heading into the future. Matt, you are going to help us kind of think through this question lending your expertise. But first off, I want to see, you know, let's take a step back. Let's talk about what actually happened during the storm. I'm sure you were probably tracking, you know, the sources of power and how everything was going. Did we ever have a moment of worry, did it ever
look sketchy at all? Or did basically Texas past this test with you know, flying colors.
Well, I would say flying colors in the sense that we had some local outages as far as you know, ice on wires, which is to be expected during this kind of storm, but nothing like we saw during Winter Storm Uri. So you know, the storm I think tells us two things at the same time. It wasn't as extreme as URI, and the grid is genuinely much stronger than it was five years ago, right, So both of those things can be true at the same time the weather,
I think duration matters a lot. URI was days of extreme cold and this storm was a lot shorter, right, But even so, we saw really high demand and tight hours and the system handled those moments without any cas gatting failure. So that's the progress and I think the state deserves a lot of credit for that.
Yeah, I mean I remember sort of telling people in the lead up, right, like we have to remember here that in Austin, when it's going to be in the twenties, that means it's going to be thirty degrees warmer than it was during that you know, winter Storm Uri, right, Like it was the difference between thirty two degrees and sixty two degrees basically, but you know, tagged on there, So definitely a situation where it wasn't as extreme of a storm. I want to kind of talk through about
some of the different reasons for that. Some of which you possibly mentioned, and see if you could just sort of reflect a little bit on on you know, what impact those different things had. The first one I want to bring up is just weatherization, right, I mean, one of the big issues in twenty twenty one was a lot of natural gas plants in particular, were not equipped for that level of cold. They you know, lost the ability to either deliver natural you know, move natural gas
or or generate power. That fell off in a very quick succession. The grid then had to sort of you know, the grid operators Urkott had to step in and you know shut you know, reduce demand significantly so we didn't completely overpower the grid. Is what is the kind of weatherization process we've gone through over the five years after that? And you know how much did that help? How much? How much is this assigned that that's working?
Definitely positive science. The state really took URI seriously and enacted serious what weatherization reforms in response to winter storm Ury, and a lot of that worked over the weekend.
Right.
So you mentioned the weatherization of gas plants was largely optional when URI hit, and that became mandatory in the aftermath, including inspections that happened on a recurring basis. Simply put, I think that gas plants during ury were not prepared for the type of extreme cold we're seeing now on
a regular basis. So I think that is a major change, and I think it's worth congratulating the state because it's something that Texas obviously took seriously, and we're doing a lot better than we were back in twenty twenty one. The grid also looks very different than it did back then, right, it's worth talking about those changes. I don't want to skip ahead too far, but the mix that we have on the grid is very different than it was this time five years ago. Yeah.
Absolutely, And that you set up my next question perfectly right, Because there's been a little bit of chatter among the sort of energy wonk world, very active Twitter community out there that I like to follow and pretend that I am one of those people as well about but a lot of those folks have been talking a lot about
batteries during this period. I will quote a story that ran in the Texas Tribune saying basically, battery storage has more than tripled between twenty twenty three and twenty twenty five. Allowing you know that you know when there's higher demand or perhaps less apply to kick in and supply more power to the grid. What did the role of batteries, What was the role of batteries in this uh during the storm and during the grid and staying as strong as it did.
It can't be overestimated, and I'm really happy you asked that question. Batteries largely didn't exist when winter Storm Ury hit on the grid, and we now have about seventeen gigawatts of installed capacity, So that's a that's a gigantic change, right, And I think there's a misunderstanding sometimes on how battery storage works, so I wanted to just touch on that. Yeah, batteries don't run all the time, right, They're not considered base load, and what they are is their emergency responders.
So what happened this is this weekend was a great example of that. Is Monday morning was when ERCA projected kind of the tightest grid conditions, meaning the generation would come very close to what the demand forecast was.
We didn't.
Luckily, we didn't come close to that, but the forecasts showed that Monday morning around eight am would be the tightest hour, and that's when batteries stepped up and discharged about seven gigwatts of energy. Right, So the technology is very different than how we think of traditional energy generation. But the advantage to battery storage you mentioned we're leading the country in battery storage. There's no other state in the country that has as much installed capacity as we do.
We're at seventeen gigwatts of capacity. And the reason that's important is because they step up extremely quickly. They're actually the most dispatchable form of energy that we have. Right There's nothing that can ramp up as quickly as batteries, and that's exactly the tool that aircut needs in its toolbox. When grid conditions are getting tight and you can cover that gap by a couple hours, that's just huge.
Can you explain a little bit just like how these batteries work? I mean, who's build bilding them? Like, what do they look like?
In cause I think minor Shanning is it's actually more similar to what we're thinking, Like can I imagine batteries? People think, like, surely you don't just mean batteries, But minor shanning is, like the prep work I did before the storm of recharging my phone bank is not that different than what we're talking about here.
Right, Yeah, So there's grid scale batatteries, right, and those are the ones we're talking about in this conversation. And then there's distributed batteries like a power wall or a base power battery. Right, A bunch of good examples there. But on the grid, the utility scale batteries, what they do is they store electricity when there's plenty of cheap electrons, right, So in Texas that typically means in the afternoon hours,
when solar power output is really high. That's when batteries start storing their energy, and then they discharge when prices are a lot higher and energy is more scarce. Right. So they're entirely being built by private companies, right, This is all private investment coming to Texas. And what they look like is they look pretty much like large shipping containers that are sitting at substations or next to power
plants for the most part in rural Texas. They could be they could range anywhere from the size of huge shipping container to the size of a refrigerator in a garage. Right, But they all fundamentally work the same way, which is they store power and then release it instantly. When the grid needs some help.
And one of the things I think there's an interesting conversation about this is how much can we rely on batteries to prevent you know, things like what happened in
twenty twenty one. Right. One thing I've sort of read about these batteries is they're great for moments of sort of short term need, but you know then you sort of drain them of their juice and you have to recharge them and wait till a time where power again sort of like amply available and everything like that tell me a little bit about like how they factor into the idea of keeping the grid secure in an event like this or maybe even an event like twenty and
twenty one where you have much more sustained low temperatures and issues there.
Yeah, that's a great question, and I think it points to how political energy has gotten since Winterstorm EURI. Right, there's a feeling I think at the capital of well, I like this technology but not the other one, and fundamentally that's not how the grid works, right, Like, all these different technologies play a really important role. And you can go look at you know, the urkat dashboard, like a lot of us nerds do and just track it all day long and see what the generation mix looks
like as the day goes on. Right, You're not going to have solar power at nine pm, right, but you're gonna have tons of solar capacity in those peak afternoon hours.
Right.
Similarly, you'll see battery storage stepping up during like a cold winter morning like we saw last weekend, right, or in the summertime that typically is in the sunset hours, right when the sun goes down before that wind energy picks up at night, So it's covering those really important gaps when the grid needs more battery storage. So they're not meant to run the grid all day, absolutely, They're meant to handle the most dangerous moments, the spikes, the gaps,
the surprises when a power plant trips. That's when batteries really play a huge role. So they don't replace the engine. They think of them more as shock absorbers on the system.
Is there any worry? I mean, I don't know if I've necessarily heard this specific argument, which doesn't mean that it isn't out there, but I remember, like you know, the conversation around like wind power and even solar power during the last winter storm was right, like it comes on during the good times, when it's sunny and the
wind is blowing. It's very cheap to produce during those times, which changes the profit margin situation from a place like a coal power plant or a gap natural gas power plant, making it less likely for those things to come on. But then something bad happens, like twenty twenty one or maybe even twenty twenty six, when you need that coal and gas but the market has kept them out of it,
making the grid less sustainable. Is that an argument that you hear and do you lend any credence to that argument? I guess I'm looking now less in terms of how we did this past, you know, a couple of weeks, in terms of like long term futureable sustainability. Yeah, what do you think about that? That question?
It's a great question. And we have a competitive free market in Urcat, right, which is very unique across the country. And I can tell you from working in the private sector, there's a lot of businesses that prefer DOT coming to Texas versus other rtos or ISOs where markets are less competitive, right, And there are capacity markets across the country that don't necessarily function as efficiently as we do here. In Texas. So to answer your question, solar and wind absolutely lower
the baseline price. Right. They have no fuel costs, so when they're producing, they basically displace the most expensive generators and that keeps prices lower and it reduces how often the market gets close to scarcity, right, like during a winter storm event. And then batteries, like we were just talking about, when demand surges or something trips offline, that's when the prices can jump fast. And we saw that
during Winter Storm Uri, right, those insane price spikes. So batteries respond instantly to those prices and inject power at that key moment. So they all play a critical role. And you know, I think the state Texas has shown it's all of the above strategy over the last several years. And I know Governor Abbott has talked about how we've added forty gigawatts of generation since Winter Storm Jury, right, about ninety percent of new generations since then has been solar,
wind and batteries. And that's again, that's just free market economics. It's not being subsidized. It's all just private investment being made in Texas, and all the market signals are there because of all the low growth that's coming, and that's like a whole other podcast that we could do talking about data centers and AI and all that.
Yeah, and I do want to get into that a little bit. But you actually set up as we're going down the list of you know, factors for why this year was better than five years ago. I mean, the other one I wanted to touch on was just the rise of wind and solar. Right, there is a lot more and in solar power online now than there was five years ago. How did that affect things?
It is huge that we saw. So I believe Monday was the coldest day of the year on January twenty sixth, and solar peaked at twenty five gigawatts, win peaked at eighteen gigawatts, battery storage peaked at over seven gigawatts. So if you add that all up, you're looking at over fifty gigawatts of clean, reliable power when Texas needed it the most, Right, So, I think we're in a new chapter now where the technology is proven and stepping up
in a big way when we need it. Not to mention you know, several months in a row during the summertime where solar and batteries are keeping the lights on for millions of Texans. So I think I hope that the political phase of how we talk about energy has ended, because again, we're going to need all of the electrons to keep the grid up and running, considering how much load is coming to our state.
And I mean fans of the pot. Last week, we talked obviously about like the oil and gas industry and how and you know, we talked about like even on that side, I think most people in oil and gas are kind of like, you know, we need all the energy from all the sources, like as long as everything is sort of is working. And that was you know, unrelated to the weather, but just like we're going to need a lot more energy for all the data centers and AI and just people move into Texas, you.
Know, And that's that's such an overlook point because oil and gas is electrifying their operations out in the permea, right, so they increasingly need cheap electrons, mainly solar and batteries
to electrify and keep those those costs down. So it's all interrelated, right, Like all of these different sectors depend on each other, and I think that all we can do as a state is planned for the load that's coming, and try to be more proactive and not just wait for the tsunami to hit, but really start getting ready and send those markets to make sure that folks are coming with us here versus in other parts of the country.
Yeah, so the last question, we'll go back to what we were talking about at the very beginning, right, which is just also, the weather wasn't as bad as it was five years ago, right, And and that sort of sets up like, I guess the big picture question I'd be interested in your insight on, which is how much of this past you know, a couple of weeks is a sign that we fixed our grid problems or how much of it is just well, it wasn't as bad as it was before, right, Like if a twenty twenty
one level storm hit us now, would you feel more confident in our ability to withstand it? Then? You know we should have felt heading into twenty twenty one.
That's that's the question, right And you know I'm not nostradamus, and yeah, it's hard to put hypotheticals on it, but I will say we dip down into like single digit temperatures, then we are in trouble. And a lot of that comes from resistance heating. Like I think folks don't quite understand how inefficient our homes and businesses are. If you add up all of the resistance heating in Texas, you would get about twelve to fourteen gigwatts.
Explain resistance heating really quick.
Yeah, So think of like blowing a toaster oven through your home, and that's really what resistance heating is. It's
just extremely inefficient electric heating. And that's still how we build a lot of our multi family homes and apartments across the state, right because you know, the building codes are very minimal, and you know, we can get into that conversation, but really the point here is that if you could solve the resistance heating problem, you can just wipe off twelve to fourteen gigwatts of peak load during
the wintertime. And that's the key problem. If we dip down to single digits, you're going to see just the heating skyrocket. And it's not just about a grid emergency. It's also about the costs for the folks that are living in those homes, right, because they hopefully make it through the weekend, but then at the end of the month that the bill comes in and those prices are exorbitant, right, and we're in twenty twenty six and still building homes
as if we were in the twentieth century. So that in my mind, that's like the quickest, lowest hanging fruit if you want to solve this winter problem.
I think, you know, these one off freezing cold disasters in Texas get so much attention, but I you know, we've also had extremely hot summers where we've had to worry about the grid getting tight. I mean, how do we look on that side of things going into the summer for what, frankly is like a pretty standard expected Texas weather disaster of people cooking to death on the sidewalk.
Yeah, well, that that is really interesting. Like I would encourage folks to pull up you could see it on the dashboard. There's also a great website called grid Status where you can check out the numbers. But there's a pretty consistent pattern that happens in the summertime in Texas right where you can really count on before the sun comes up in the morning, you've got that battery storage
showing up on the grid. Sunrise happened. Solar really ticks up until the evening hours when the sun goes down. That's also when batteries play a critical role. And then you've got the great wind energy at night that helps us out in the summertime. So I think we're better prepared for summer than we were even two or three years ago because of solar and batteries, because the build out, the deployment of solar and batteries has been so monumental
over the past few years. But the extreme heat will always push the system, right, the key difference now is that the grid has more tools to manage those moments instead of just immediately heading towards blackouts.
Well, and then there's another question here, right, which is that just as we have added all this power, just as we've done the weatherization and all the other things that needed to happen. After twenty twenty one, we have this new technology coming online which you mentioned, data centers, AI, all those different types of things in which we are expecting the demand on the grid to go up significantly
in the coming years. An Ercott projection saying that peak demand could climb from about eighty seven gigawatts in twenty twenty five to around one hundred and forty five gigawatts in just six years to twenty thirty one. I know that there's some questions about, you know, will all that demand actually come online, and how much of that is real and how much of it is not. But I think it's safe to say a dramatic increase can be
expected in the coming years. How worried should we be about kind of all these improvements and all these gains being erased due to changes in technology moving forward?
Yeah, I think that's where the conversation is heading. And these days it feels like you can't talk about energy without talking about AI. And the opposite is also true, because in AI circles, folks just want to talk about energy and how they're going to come online in the next few years, considering the power scarcity. And this is not a Texas problem, this is a national problem, right, Folks are talking about this across the country. The low
growth is unprecedented. But I think that Texas has a really good track record of building energy infrastructure faster than almost anywhere else. There's really no other part of the country that could accommodate all of that low growth so quickly, right, And I think that the Public Utility Commission deserves a lot of credit. I think Urka deserves a lot of credit, frankly, because they've taken the steps to build out the high
voltage transmission lines right. So the first seven sixty five lines are getting built in Texas, and we're going to need much more of that if we're going to move cheap electrons across the state. So I think the number is you know, is serious, and I think it can scare some people, but it's not a crisis if we plan for it right. We're very good at building energy fast. I think that's what we do do in Texas. So
the risk isn't the growth itself. I think the risk is falling back into the old mindset and the old ways of planning.
And of course, so much of that growth, that fast growth that you've been talking about, has been in renewables, you know, solar in particular. Our friend you know I talked about you know, energy Wonk Twitter. Our friend Doug Lewin posted on Twitter a couple of days ago that the state set a new solar power record on February first.
It was supplying twenty nine megawatts of solar power to the grid in the afternoon, which is which was slightly more than half of the power that was fed to the grid at that time, which is a pretty amazing uh uh you know shift I you know, we break that record fairly frequently. Two years ago, when Doug was celebrating that record, it was you know, half the amount that it was just a couple of days ago. Tell
me the story there, like, what's what's happening? Why is Texas you know, growing so much in a state where as you already mentioned, you know, there is a lot of talk about protecting the fossil fuel industry and maybe even some resistance to to renewable energy.
Yeah, and it's such a great story because I get like, you know, national reporters calling all the time, and they're like always surprised to hear that we're leading the country in soular wind batteries. Right, They're like, how did Texas become the leader in renewable energy in the country?
Right?
Well, I think we were blessed with the natural resources to start there, Like we just happened to have a huge amount of sunshine, vast open land that makes solar generation much more productive compared to in you know, most other states, frankly, but the key factor I think has been the competitive or cup market because we reward low cost generation in Texas, right, solar has really low fuel costs, so once the panels are built, the energy is basically
free and on a really sunny day, which you know we have plenty of in Texas, that pushes more expensive generation out of the market. Right. It makes solar economically attractive for developers that come to do business here. So the result of all of that, not to mention the permitting and the transmission capacity that we have here. You know, Texas is a very easy state when it comes to permitting, like developers have a much harder time building in other places.
So the result of that is rapid growth, and we now lead the country in solar capacity. I think the numbers recently passed coal. I think solar capacity did surpassed coal on the Urcot grid, which was a milestone that I think no one saw coming about a decade ago.
Right.
So we're really leading the country as far as a competitive market that rewards the cheapest electron available, right, and a business environment that, as you know it just lets projects get built extremely quickly.
We have talked about on this podcast before dating back to last summer and had conversations with you offline about this too, right, about how the story of sort of government involvement with renewables and resistance and lack of resistance the Texas legislature, there was a series of bills filed last year that really targeted the renewable industry or would have you know, a lot of people in the industry
argued would have been harmful to the industry. Uh, those almost exclusively, almost completely did not end up passing, in part because of a decision made by you know, many Republicans of that sort of like everything, you know, all of the above like approach to energy and feeding the grid. And then you know, just a couple of months later, the big beautiful bill passed and and and some some things that that kind of targeted the the the industry
were in that bill and ended up going forward. I'm curious now, you know, we are you know a little bit of like half a year since that bill passed. Have we seen any impact of that in the renewable growth going forward? Like do we have a better sense now of how that legislation will will affect things in Texas?
Yeah, And it really goes back to the politics of energy, right, and choosing and losers instead of just letting the competitive free market do its thing, right, which is again where Texas sets the standard for the country. So I can touch on the Texas bills, but I think you reached the conclusion, which is none of them passed the legislature in Washington. You know they did pass the Big beautiful bill has had an impact. I think solar and battery
projects have mostly continued moving forward in Texas. So you know, developers are still signing deals and building capacity because of all the reasons I just talked about, Right, the urcot market. The resources are abundant here, easy permitting, so we haven't seen developers really pull back those investments. The federal tax incentives I think have improved project economics across the country in general. Right, But Texas is still one of the
most competitive places to build. I think that you can compare Texas to other parts of the US and point to some areas of success. Right, So, like, what do we do really well? Well, we are, our market efficiency and our economics are very strong.
Right.
It's not like Texas is passing some mandate or some state law requiring a certain generation mix, right, or you know you mentioned some of the bills that were proposing the legislature last year. None of those pasts because Republicans are willing to stand up for free market economics and leave the private sector alone and let it do its thing. So I would say it's you know, it's a complicated question.
I think overall, I would I would say that the competitive market in Texas is still the clear winner here, and my hope is that that continues in that Republicans and Democrats should work together to keep the grid affordable and reliable. Right Like we're talking about these AI data centers. We can't afford to be cutting out electrons because they you know, they're labeled a certain way, right Like, this is ultimately it's about the most affordable and reliable technology.
So at this stage, considering what the numbers look like, I don't think we're in a position to wipe any of this generation off the table.
Well, you know, we have seen how eleanor the technology has really made our energy system more reliable during these storms. If only we could have a similar advance on our transportation system and you know, be able to drive when these things happen now, or.
Our ability to ice or to salt the sidewalk in front of our office, which remained an ice sheet for somehow a week.
Yes, but you know that's for a different podcast.
We can with our building management. We'll bring them in.
Thank you eleanor thank you Matt for walking us through this really been interesting and helpful. Thank you to our producers Rob and Chris for getting this all together and for composing our theme song. We will talk to y'all next week.
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