Heat is battering Texas’s power grid. Are giant batteries the answer?
The worst may be yet to come, with extreme weather forecast to persist into next weekend
By Evan Halper
June 24, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
The punishing heat dome that has settled over Texas is putting unprecedented strain on the state’s electricity system, leaving officials scrambling to keep the lights on and the air conditioners cranking.
The oppressive heat has endured for days, and it may get worse before the heat dome lifts. Some forecasts show temperatures soaring past 100 degrees in all three major metropolitan areas — Houston, Dallas and Austin — at once in the coming days. Tens of millions of people in Texas and nearby states have been under extreme heat advisories since June 14.
But Texas is uniquely vulnerable to power failures because it cannot draw electricity from neighbors in a crisis. It is the only state in the contiguous United States disconnected from the national grid, a deliberate move to avoid federal regulation.
“Next week is going to be the real test,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “Just about every single air conditioner in those regions is going to want energy at the same time.”
State officials are increasingly turning to an unexpected technology: giant batteries.
These Mack truck-size systems, which can quickly spew stored electrons onto the grid when power plants sputter, played a crucial role in avoiding outages over the past week, as scorching temperatures shattered records across Texas. And they are renewing debate about the role of clean energy in stabilizing the Texas grid, as the batteries are ideal for harnessing wind and solar energy.
Power system operators across the country are watching closely to see how Texas manages this crisis. While the perilous combination of prolonged triple-digit temperatures and overstressed power plants and transmission lines is plaguing Texas at the moment, it could hit most regions at any time. Changes in the weather and the deteriorating condition of regional power grids make the entire nation increasingly vulnerable to outages for longer stretches of the year.
“Texas is experiencing what everyone in the country is going to be going through in some form or fashion in the years ahead,” said Aaron Zubaty, the CEO of Eolian, which owns and operates large energy storage projects. “All the systems are not necessarily designed for operating in these types of prolonged events at the edge of design and engineering specifications. … These are the types of weather events that can cause weird things to occur that no one has ever thought about at all types of plants.”