I was just chatting with a friend on how we haven't received the conservation emails like we have in previous years. This year has not been as extreme either as the DFW metroplex has not had the extended 100°+ days. We've just had a run of 3 or 4, but we've had 30+ consecutive days in the past.
Austin here, we’re enrolled in a conservation plan through Austin Energy whereby they control our smart thermostats (Nest in our case). These “Rush Hour” notices have been firing a lot over the past two weeks; perhaps only two days where we haven’t been asked to conserve somewhere between 3-6 hours a day.
Are you sure? I just looked and there was a Rush Hour for Friday, Monday, Tuesday, and today. The last one before that was Aug 8. O16 days total this summer, the first being June 13.
The year before was worse to me, but followed by another one just as bad it just made it feel worse. I don't remember '23 being as humid as '22, but maybe that's just faulty memory shorting out from the humidity???
No, this summer is objectively one of the best we've had in a long time, at least in Austin. The fact that we've only had a few days above 105 is a blessing.
I mean, it's Texas - it's always blazing hot at the end of August, and that's to be expected. What's really changed over the past 25-50 years is that the plus 100 days have been starting earlier and earlier, and we've been having more of them. Thankfully, that wasn't the case this year.
Again, that is far from the definition of "great". I would say fortunate to not have those string of triple digits, but man, it's not great at all. 100°+ is still miserable, but it's amazing how different 98° feels from 105°. I get Texas hyperbole, but even my feet are firmly planted in reality to not accept "great" in this meaning. Bless your heart! ;-)
Bless your heart for trying to be so witty but in fact coming off foolish.
Texas is simply hot and has been for our timelines. You could make the same silly comments about locations that have long and cold winters. Texas is hot we get it, you don't like it but it does not change that this summer has been great, it is a lot cooler than usual.
No. The 130 MW remaining capacity was the amount available "in SCED within 5 minutes", which in super simplified terms means "the amount of energy available quickly and economically".
The grid actually had ~4 GW spare capacity (according to the graph) if it was needed, but it wasn't part of SCED.
My understanding is that it's the latter. "in SCED" basically means they have pre-planned availability that is cheap.
The "Physical Response Capacity" in that graph is the amount of capacity actually available, but it's not part of SCED. However it doesn't say anything about the timeframe it would be available in. Given that ERCOT didn't call for conservation, I would have to assume it was capacity that was "quickly available, but not cheap" rather than "not quickly available", but I don't know for sure.
Being in SCED just means that the resource bid into the real time energy market (which clears every 5 mins), it does not necessarily mean that the resource is cheap to dispatch. The confusion here might be caused by the differences of the ancillary market (PRC) and the energy market (SCED).
This is a state that should basically be peppered with residential rooftop solar.
Of course, there's zero chance of any sort of state governmental policy to help incentivize it in deep red state land.
But if recent history has shown anything, I would consider it a primary feature of any home in Texas to be relatively grid independent with its own generating capacity and storage.
Texas has a lot of incentives for residential solar. I'm not sure where you live, but in my DFW suburb, my neighborhood _is_ peppered in rooftop solar.
A lot of the incentives are from local power companies like Oncor, but one notable state-wide incentive is that solar installations are exempt from property tax by state law.
I dunno why people act like Texas is staunchly anti-renewable. TX state politicians have said some goofy stuff about "windmills freezing over", but overall Texans are extremely pro-wind and pro-solar. It's a huge economic driver for a large part of the state, and it's seen as an overall part of Texas's strong energy industry, complimentary to oil rather than as a competitor to it. George Bush and Rick Perry were both Republican governors but both were _very_ pro-renewable and oversaw massive booms in wind energy especially. In 2005 Texas (including Perry at the time) passed a law to invest billions of state dollars into building transmission lines specifically to make it feasible for renewable energy generation in west Texas to bring power to the populated areas in the east, which is attributed to the massive wind boom. Abbot, on the other hand, has sadly not been very pro-renewable, but much of the state still is.
Here just north of Austin, PEC implemented one of the most regressive solar programs in the country. Their argument in their study was that they make less money off solar since they can't sell as much power.
Regressive in what manner? Historically a lot of solar buy-back programs were incredibly inflated. Residential solar can be great for the resident but is usually not great for the grid. Paying resi. solar producers greater than market rates always felt foolish to me.
PEC never paid greater than market rates, they simply gave a net credit since solar was only reducing load at the service drop for a neighborhood. The cost to them was swapping the meter for a bidirectional one. Now at some point if enough people started using solar, they have the option of either curtailment (which would be automatically reflected in the existing meters), which at that point would justify an increase in fees, but their study was specific that they lowered solar compensation due to being able to sell less power to solar users (not for infrastructure reasons), which makes no sense why they are singling out solar since they offer incentives for other efficiency measures such as more efficient AC units to lower power consumption.
Regressive in that solar programs are not inflated, but do require distribution upgrades to realize their efficiency advantages over centralized power transmission. These distribution upgrades are costly to IOUs because they cut into their margins when the efficiency of distributed generation is considered.
Paying distributed generation export at retail rates or higher (DR, etc) makes plenty of sense because there are significant load, resiliency, and efficiency advantages to homeowners who are supposed to be the ones to benefit most from the grid.
The only change needed for solar users is a different meter swapped at the house that supports bidirectional metering. Solar power at the residential level only lowers overall demand in the neighborhood and on the grid, and in the very rare case where the net solar production exceeds the entire neighborhood's demand, PEC could choose to simply not use that excess (curtailment) and the meter at each person's house would accurately reflect that with no upgrades needed (Texan power utilities are not required to buy back excess solar). So the added cost to PEC is entirely optional. At its worst PEC was only crediting almost half of the power they were reselling from solar users (from originally a simple net credit), although they've thankfully been starting to backpeddle on that.
Honestly, I would prefer they simply charged the cost of swapping meters and adjusted the flat infrastructure fee for solar users (when necessary) for cases where upgrades are needed in neighborhoods with excess solar generation. Instead, PEC is able to resell solar power for a very significant profit with their current rates.
Please don't bring red or blue into the argument. Texas is indeed peppered with residential solar, it can make real economic sense for the homeowner. Of course you probably won't see the inflated solar programs that California created back in the day but they also have largely pulled back on those as they don't help the grid and can become quite costly to buy back at inflated rates. In my experience the best you will get in Texas is close to ercot market rates, so not much. On the other hand that can make on-site storage more economically attractive.
I don't know anything about durability of solar panels but it should be known that in Texas there is always expectation of annual hail damage to roofs.
Replacing solar panels is cheaper and easier than replacing roof tiles, so you can even use solar panels as hail protection for your roof :^) (I'm half-serious, ofc)