'No wonder the lights went out'

Mar. 12—A lack of preparedness and mismanaged regulation are at least partly to blame for the power crisis that took place mid-February in Texas, according to local business leader Ed Schweitzer.

Speaking during a virtual "Cup of Joe" event hosted by the University of Idaho, Schweitzer, the founder, president and chief technology officer of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in Pullman, said the entire power industry was founded on the concept of regional monopolies that are regulated by a public utility commission.

Schweitzer said ideally, these monopolies manage the generation, transmission and distribution of power within their regional network and are connected to similar groups in neighboring regions to help ensure the delivery of that power. He said these groups generally understood themselves to be public service companies with a responsibility to their customers and the PUCs ensured prices and profits remained within reasonable margins.

In Texas, where the flow of electric power to more than 26 million customers is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, he said responsibilities are spread out among multiple entities — distributors purchase energy from generators, and retailers market it to consumers.

"What's missing today, I believe, is this close link of public service companies dedicated to its customers that do the whole thing — the generation, transmission and distribution and billing," Schweitzer said. "It gets a lot harder to see who's really responsible to you and me, the customer, for your and my generation; who is really behind those ready kilowatts when you go to plug something in."

In this environment where there appears to be little accountability to the consumer, Schweitzer said ERCOT forecast last fall that peak demand of its services during the winter would be 67 gigawatts, and predicted it would have reserve resources of 69 which he called "an awfully small margin." This ended up being optimistic.

"The reality is the actual peak was 69 (gigawatts), the actual resources were only 43, leaving a margin of minus 38 percent," he said. "No wonder the lights went out."

ERCOT's service area in Texas has four interconnections to the rest of the world, Schweitzer said, or four points where it connects to other groups that produce, transmit and distribute power. However all of these points put together could only add about 1.2 gigawatts total to the Texas grid, coming nowhere near closing the gap between the 43 gigawatts available and the 69 gigawatts needed to meet energy demands during the peak of the crisis. He said this means speculation that Texans would have fared better in February if they were more interconnected to the rest of the country is likely off base.

While people are treating what he called the "2021 Valentines Day Surprise," as a storm of the century, Schweitzer said similar events have taken place in 2011, 2003 and 1989. Following these crises, there is some movement to improve winterization at power plants, which could help with dependable generation. Additionally, he said pricing needs to be more stable during such crises. He pointed out while some were paying exorbitantly high prices during the energy crisis, others in Texas were actually being paid for their energy use.

Schweitzer said the ability to generate and transmit power over vast distances at the speed of light is a modern miracle but certain factors need to be managed to prevent such large-scale service failures from happening again.

"Available generation must exceed the load otherwise the lights go out. Economic arrangements need to be simple and easy to understand. Regulations need to be simple too and our regulators should not have this ability to suddenly say 'no the Texas price should vary all over the place,' " he said. "...Finally the responsibility for dependable generation must be closer to us customers."

Scott Jackson can be reached at (208) 883-4636, or by email to sjackson@dnews.com.