Rolling blackouts may be on the summer horizon

Better hope the mild weather we’re getting in winter translates to mild weather for the summer, because the alternative isn’t pretty.

Inadequate electric power reserves likely will force Texans to cut back this summer to avoid rolling outages if the weather matches last year’s record heat, utility experts warned legislators [last] Thursday.

“We have to have conservation, and everyone made a tremendous difference during the peak of hot, summer days (last) August. We have to have that, plus some, to survive this summer without rotating outages,” H.B. “Trip” Doggett, president and CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told the House State Affairs Committee.

Legislators are looking at the state’s electricity market to find ways to keep lights on in Texas during peak demand periods. A range of issues contributes to the problem, including surging population growth, regulatory influences on the power industry, low natural gas prices that discourage new power plants, and difficulties in borrowing money to build them. Texas faces “a serious problem,” State Affairs Chairman Byron Cook, R-Corsicana, said after 13 experts spoke to his committee.

“It looks like we’re going to really have to embrace conservation because we don’t have the extra generation,” he said.

I’d say we need to embrace conservation anyway for a whole host of reasons, but in this particular case the need is obvious. One solution suggested in the story to help achieve that is a public relations campaign to explain the situation to residents. I remember Con Edison in New York doing exactly this sort of thing in the 70s. They were a sponsor of Yankee games on WPIX, and their exhortations to conserve electricity, usually given by the Yankees’ broadcasters, were on all the time. If I can remember that 35 years later, it seems safe to suggest this kind of campaign can have an effect. We’ll need a lot more than that going forward, but one hopes this can suffice for now.

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One Response to Rolling blackouts may be on the summer horizon

  1. ERCOT and the Lege could do a lot for conservation with price incentives. My price runs two or three cents above my contract price because we’ve updated systems and appliances to cut our usage. I’d have to use three times as much power to get the advertised rate.

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