TEMPLE, Texas — Temple Generation CEO Daniel Hudson runs the T1 natural gas power plant in Temple, Texas. 6 News spoke to Hudson and Texas Rep. Hugh Shine June 30 about issues facing the power grid. Hudson revealed that what has been happening with the state power grid may not be completely accurate.
When ERCOT started calling for conservation the week of June 14, ERCOT said around 12,000 MW had gone offline and nearly all of the outages were due to equipment issues. They were not able to go into further detail.
Based on preliminary information received from generation owners, the vast majority of forced outages that occurred were due to equipment issues.
"Our operations group is analyzing the information and will be providing a more comprehensive overview of the causes," Spokeswoman Leslie Sopko said.
On June 24, ERCOT VP of grid planning and operations Woody Rickerson walked back that statement a bit by telling the Public Utility Commission of Texas that power plants sometimes take a "maintenance level outage" which is sometimes necessary to prevent a forced outage. These outages can be scheduled one-to-seven days out, and Rickerson said some of the forced outages in June may have been "maintenance level."
Of course, the PUC simply wanted to know what power plants were doing, and how to keep that from happening as the summer continues.
"The first question is: Who is out and why? Let's figure that out," PUC Chairman Peter Lake said. "That is one of three factors that put us in a tough spot last week."
Enter Temple Generation CEO Daniel Hudson, who was willing to explain, in regular English, what power plants do when they need to fix something.
"Whenever you have an operational issue, we schedule an outage. We schedule with ERCOT to say 'We want to come down this weekend to fix this, this and this.' If they don't allow it we just don't bid into the market and we come down anyway to fix our unit. What we are not going to do is wreck a plant worth $500 million," Hudson said.
Many natural gas power producers provide a bid to ERCOT of how much power they will put on the system a day in advance. If they need to fix something, they just don't bid anything. Simple as that.
For this reason, ERCOT may or may not know if some power plants are available when they need more power. ERCOT is supposed to have information on who is out and why, but they generally don't share it with the public for 60 days.
Hudson, on the other hand, has a service available to access that information. He told 6 News many generators were taking maintenance outages around February 14, though there were actually equipment problems that needed attention as well.
"Most of them were trying to prepare for the summertime period. June has not been a peak month and there is normally enough generation," Hudson said. "Some of them were (down) for maintenance. Comanche Peak had a fire at their nuclear plant and their transformer so they were down that week... and then you had some other ones that were just preparing for the summer."
Hudson said their power plant in Temple was running during that period but then took a scheduled outage last weekend to make repairs. He said power plant owners are currently focused on getting ready for the next two months. Hudson said no one expected wind power, which can theoretically max out at 28,000 MW would be around just 1000 during the previous two weeks.
"We want to be available for July and august. Those are the peak times," Hudson said.
Still, this wouldn't create a problem for the Texas power grid if there was enough non-renewable energy that could be called up if the grid gets low. Hudson and Texas Rep. Hugh Shine told 6 News there will soon not be not enough, and they are concerned the situation will get worse.
"We are not adding the capacity that we need to add and the state is growing. We've got a thousand people a day coming into the state on the average and the demand for power is continuing to grow," Shine said.
Shine said Texas doesn't provide enough incentive to build power plants because all prices are based on an indexed price that changes day to day, which is also known as an energy market. He said companies will build where they can get more consistent prices in other parts of the U.S.
"The investment side is key. If people are not willing to come into Texas and build gas generating plants, we are going to continue with the same situation," Shine said.
Hudson said just the planning stage to build a new natural gas plant can take more than two years, and more power will be needed in Texas.