They will not be useless there.
No longer seen at I-10 and Sawyer
Texas’ main grid operator on Tuesday approved a $54 million plan to replace two aging natural gas-powered plants near San Antonio with the massive mobile generators that CenterPoint Energy came under fire for not deploying in the wake of Hurricane Beryl in July.
Under the plan, 15 mobile generators currently leased by CenterPoint will be moved from Houston to San Antonio this summer. Customers across the state grid will pay the estimated $54 million cost to move, connect and operate the diesel-fueled generators.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas board unanimously approved the agreement on Tuesday after San Antonio’s municipal utility, CPS Energy, said in March that it planned to retire three of its gas-powered units at the Braunig Power Station this year. Each of those units is roughly 60 years old — decades older than gas-powered plants are typically built to last.
ERCOT said that the loss of those units, which sit near a problem area in the state’s transmission infrastructure, would increase the risks of power outages across the grid. Transmission capacity has not kept up with an increasing demand for power in North Texas, causing a bottleneck in the San Antonio area where the risk of overloaded lines and widespread outages increase when wind and solar power from South Texas come pouring in.
In December, ERCOT agreed to reimburse the utility $50 million to keep one of the three units, Braunig 3, running.
Tuesday’s decision allows the other two units, Braunig 1 and 2, to be retired this year. Their capacity will be replaced by CenterPoint’s large mobile generators, each of which provide around 30 megawatts of generation. (ERCOT estimates that one megawatt can power around 250 homes.)
“This is a solution to bridge that gap, to lower that chance of load shed,” or rolling outages, Bill Flores, chair of the ERCOT Board of Directors, said Tuesday. “Load shed has a severe cost. We’re trying to avoid that, but you have to spend money, essentially, for insurance to avoid that.”
CPS Energy, San Antonio’s utility, is working on expanding transmission infrastructure to address the bottleneck, but that project will take years to complete. State regulators and lawmakers are also focused on how to build out transmission to address increasing demand for power across the state.
See here for the background. I’m glad something productive will come out of this fiasco, for a relatively minimal cost. Just, maybe it should be CenterPoint who absorbs that cost. They can afford it. The Chron has more.
Since the blogger did not mention it, today is a don’t buy anything day.