The Road Not Taken

Let’s say, not entirely hypothetically, it's Sunday afternoon in the middle of a months-long, hellish heat wave. Several coal and gas power plants, overburdened by the oppressive heat and Public Utility Commission and ERCOT policies requiring them to run even when they aren’t needed, have tripped offline, and the grid is in danger of seeing demand exceed supply, which could lead to rolling outages. 

If you're the grid operator, what do you do?

Let me present two different scenarios.

Scenario #1: Too Real

At 4pm, you issue a call asking Texans to voluntarily conserve energy from 7–10pm. You hope this will help moderate demand, but you don't know if it will. Indeed, since you just called for conservation three days before, it’s possible that people will be put off by the request to cut back again and will decide to use even more. That’s not even necessarily an illogical or mean-spirited decision; if the grid doesn't hold, they might figure they’d be more comfortable if they can cool down the house as much as possible before the power goes out — especially if they don’t trust you to keep the lights on. 

But anyway, you make the conservation call, and the grid keeps running. Data might show, say, that demand dropped 3.2% in the first hour of the call — less than it did the day before (a 3.4% drop on Saturday) at the same time, without a conservation call. 

So your conservation call either didn’t do anything, or it backfired. And you’re left wondering, what if this happens again? What if the temperatures are higher when folks go back to work? What if more power plants trip off line?

As you may have gathered, this isn’t hypothetical — it’s what played out on the state’s grid over the weekend…