Whoever invents the energy battery will be a gazillionaire

Trying To deTermine how much energy Texans need is not an exact science, but it’s close.

“No one can predict perfectly how much electricity the people in Dallas are going to use at 4:15 this afternoon,” says Bill Muston, manager of research and development for Oncor. “You can predict pretty well, but it’s never perfect.”

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas [ERCOT] oversees the main power grid in Texas and tracks the generators — coal, nuclear, natural gas, wind and otherwise — that feed into the grid. In ERCOT’s control room outside of Austin, employees act as traffic cops of the grid, determining which of the 550 generators should be in use, and where the power generated should be delivered along 40,530 miles of high-voltage transmission lines.

If it’s a windy day in spring and the turbines are hard at work, ERCOT may take some of the coal or natural gas plants offline and direct more wind energy from West Texas into Dallas and other cities. If a generator shuts down because of technical problems or extreme weather, ERCOT will green light a different generator to fill the energy void.

Whatever energy being generated at a given moment is the energy available to use. There’s no way to store energy for a rainy day, so to speak.

“Batteries are about the best way to store energy, and they’re expensive,” Muston says. “As consumers, for our laptops, our cell phones, whatever, the dollars are small enough that we’ll do it.”

However, a battery that powers a home or business is cost-prohibitive for most people, he says. Some homes that use solar power have a battery backup, which allows the home to continue using electricity through its solar energy during a power outage. Those usually cost several thousand dollars.

The average U.S. home uses 1,000 watts, or 1 kilowatt, at any given time. A typical coal plant or large wind farm simultaneously can generate 500,000 times as much power. No one so far has created an efficient way to store that kind of energy.

Rolling blackouts happen on purpose

mosT power ouTages are accidents a power line affected by a tree limb falling, a car crashing, a lightning bolt striking. But the “rolling blackouts” that Texans experienced Feb. 2, 2011, were no accident.

The problem wasn’t simply the record lows — 14 degrees in Dallas, with a high of only 21 — that caused heaters to work overtime. (More than two-thirds of Texans’ heat is powered by electricity, according to the state comptroller’s office.) The problem was that generators were failing.

“It was not only cold many days in a row, but the wind was blowing, and generators were getting into some freezing problems,” says Bill Muston of Oncor.

The freezing, which Muston compares to “a frozen pipe at your house,” forced coal and

How powerful is Texas?

74,000

Megawatts of energy that the ERCOt power grid can produce at any given moment

200

Homes powered by one megawatt during peak demand

68,305 the record for megawatt peak demand on Aug. 3, 2011 during the record heat wave

Source: ERCOT natural gas plants to go offline; wind turbines also were suffering from ice on their blades. All in all, 75 generators were out of commission that day, and ERCOT foresaw that Texans’ demand for energy would overreach the supply.

“If ERCOT has done all the generation it can and all-calls to neighborhoods to cut back, then neighborhoods go in the dark,” Muston says.

As a result, Dallasites experienced what Oncor describes as “the longest-lasting and farthest-reaching emergency load-shedding in Texas history.” For more than eight hours, as many as 275,000 Oncor customers at a time experienced rotating outages, each lasting about 15 minutes.

It was better than the alternative, Muston says — a system crash that would be unpredictable and would likely mean much longer blackouts.

“You don’t want to have a blackout like in the San Diego area a few years ago or in New York in 2003,” Muston says. “No one believes it, but it’s in your interest that they cut your power at your house for a few hours. What happened in that event was some really good planning that was executed well.”

Q. Whom should I call when the lights go out?

A. Oncor*, most likely, which is the company that delivers our electricity. It can be confusing, though, with all the different players in texas’ energy grid. Here’s a cheat sheet:

Generators: texas has 550 generating units across the state that create energy from natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind and other sources.

Electric Reliability Council of Texas: ERCOt is an independent organization that manages the wholesale electricity market in texas. When a rolling blackout happens, it’s because ERCOt mandated it.

*Transmission and delivery companies: In Dallas, there’s only one company — Oncor — that funnels power from the state’s generators through transmission lines and into homes and businesses. During a power outage, Oncor employees are the ones who can restore it. Call 888.313.4747 to let them know (even though your smart meter may be able to notify them more quickly).

Retail electricity providers, or retailers: these are companies such as tXu Energy, Reliant, green Mountain Energy and others that track and bill for electricity use. they contact Oncor to turn on electricity when you move into a new house, for example, or to shut it off when you aren’t paying your bill. Retailers don’t have anything to do with outages caused by storms or power line damage.

50

Retail electricity providers in the competitive areas of texas

250+ the number of plans offered by retail electricity providers (details at powertochoose.org)

Source: ERCOT and TXU Energy

A. Nope. Coal, natural gas and nuclear power are still being pumped through your transmission lines and into your home, most likely. But you are guaranteeing that the amount of renewable energy you are paying for will be piped into the power grid.

“Regardless of which retail electricity provider a customer chooses, there is no way to separate electricity on the power grid based on how it was generated,” says Juan Elizondo, a spokesman for TXU Energy. “When a consumer purchases a retail electricity plan with renewable electricity, that amount of renewable energy is put onto the power grid. It may or may not be the power that reaches that customer. Those consumers are ensuring that renewable power is put onto the grid, and they are supporting the further development of renewable resources.”

“Think of the electric grid as a giant bathtub that is constantly being filled from many different faucets, and each one represents a different electricity generation source such as coal, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.,” says Katie Ryan, spokeswoman for Green Mountain Energy. “Each time you use electricity, you drain a little water from the bathtub. As the demand for electricity from renewable sources increases, more of the clean water goes into the tub — and less of the dirty water from fossil fuel sources is needed.”

Q. Is there any way that renewable energy could grow so popular in Texas that customer demand would overtake supply?

A. Yes, in theory.

“The demand for renewable energy is what makes it grow,” Ryan says. “When demand exceeds supply, renewable energy gets built.”

Wind energy blowing into urban Texas

3,000

Miles of transmission lines built or repaired since 2008 to deliver wind power from the Panhandle and West texas to big cities

$6.7 billion tax dollars funneled into wind energy transmission lines by the Public utility Commission (PuC) of texas’ Competitive Renewable Energy Zones project

$2 million slice of the CREZ project allocated to Oncor, which delivers electricity to Dallas, to build 1,000 miles of transmission lines in its service area

1 texas’ rank in the nation as a wind energy-producing state

10,929

Megawatts of energy texas’ wind turbines are capable of generating at any given time (One megawatt equals 1 million watts; Colorado and Iowa, in second- and third-place, can generate 4,570 and 4,536 megawatts, respectively)

9,481

Megawatts produced by texas wind on Feb. 9, 2013, the state’s wind generation record

27.8

Percentage of the state’s energy load the wind carried on that record-setting day

200

Homes powered by one megawatt during peak demand

Oncor’s tree trimming practices

Bob Curry, chairman of the city’s Urban Forest Advisory Committee, spends his life protecting trees from developers. Like many residents of old, tree-lined neighborhoods, Curry probably cringes when Oncor staffers come around to chop branches away from power lines, right? Wrong. Find out why this die-hard tree advocate is perfectly satisfied with our electric provider’s pruning practices on lakewood.advocatemag.com.

Plant a tree for free

Because Oncor sponsors the Arbor Day Foundation, Oncor customers (that’s all of us) can sign up for up to two free trees to plant in their yards. Starting Aug. 19, visit energysavingtrees.arborday.org to qualify for the trees, which are first come, first served. The site also advises where to position the trees on your property to avoid power lines and maximize the energy efficiency potential of the tree.

How to make the electric company pay you

ElEctric rEtail providEr tXU pays M Streets resident Rick Green for solar power generated by his house.

Green doesn’t make a profit from TXU. He still has a monthly electric bill, but it’s significantly lower now than before he installed the solar panels on his roof.

He lives in a 2,800-square foot duplex on Ellsworth, and about a year ago hired a company called SolarCity to add the 8-by30 feet of solar paneling. Green paid roughly $12,000 for both the installation and to lease the panels for 20 years, “which is better than owning because they still have responsibility to maintain them,” he says.

The panels are guaranteed to generate at least 10,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of power every year, so assuming that electricity costs 10 cents a kWh, Green figures the panels save him roughly $1,000 a year.

DDS

Dr. Colter specializes in comprehensive dental care for infants, children, teens and children with special needs.

“It’s like I pre-paid my electric bill for 12 years,” Green says. After that, any solar energy produced would be free.

Dr. Colter and her staff want children and their parents to feel comfortable about their visit to the dentist in the warm, caring and inviting office of All About Kids Dentistry.

Green’s home itself was built in 2008, so it’s fairly energy efficient, but “we have a lot of stuff in the house that has a fairly substantial electric draw,” including five refrigerators. (Green keeps a beer fridge next to his recliner, for example. He’s all about saving energy.)

He estimates that his home uses an average of 2,000 kWh every month. Before the solar panels, that would have meant a monthly bill of about $200, he says, not including fees.

That’s a big difference from his April bill $74 and some change. The biggest portion of his bill now is taxes and fees; his electricity use accounted for less than half of the bill.

The energy created by the solar panels on Green’s house is first used to power his home. When his home isn’t using all of the solar energy created, it goes back into the grid, and TXU tracks and pays him for that energy.

“I have a two-way meter, and if you look at it, if it’s a sunny day at noon and the A/C isn’t on, you can see that my meter runs backward,” Green says. “Let’s say both of the A/C units kick on, it will start running the other way slowly.”

The way TXU’s “distributed renewable generation” program works is threefold. Because Green participates in the program, TXU charges him a higher rate — 12 cents per kWh — for any additional energy he uses from the regular power grid during the hours of 6 a.m.-10 p.m. TXU pays him 7.5 cents per kWh for any excess solar energy his home produces during those hours. And between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., TXU doesn’t charge Green for any energy used.

He receives an email each week with his usage report and a breakdown in every bill. In April those hours were split pretty evenly — he used about 500 kWh from the grid and about 500 kWh during the nighttime hours, and received a credit for about 500 kWh of solar energy his home produced for TXU.

“It’s complicated, but once you figure it out, it’s essentially self-maintaining,” Green says. “I never have to think about electricity again, other than every once in a while when we have power outages.”

He doesn’t have the kind of system that continues to run when the power grid is down. That would require a battery backup system.

Green is glad that his solar panels are hard to see from the street. It’s not a situation where “it’s nice to save $100, but, man, does it make the house ugly,” he says.

“There’s one spot about 300 feet down the block you can kind of see them shining through the trees in the light,” Green says.

The panels don’t produce as much energy in the winter because it’s cloudier, but during a summer month, they might produce as many as 1,200 kWh, he says.

“We’re kind of spoiled in Texas because of the refineries here and such, so much lower electricity costs, but still, one of the things we do have a lot of in Texas is sunshine,” Green says.

He’s a self-described “outdoors guy,” so using the available sunlight to power his house is satisfying. Just as satisfying are the dollars he saves.

“The bottom line is saving money and doing the right thing,” Green says, “not necessarily in that order.”

Are renewable energy plans the easiest way to be green?

16,000 Pounds of CO2 emissions avoided in a year by someone who participates in a 100 percent renewable energy plan and uses an average of 1,000 kilowatt hours per month

6,000 Pounds of newspapers that would have to be recycled to equal avoiding 16,000 pounds of CO2 emissions

Source: Green Mountain Energy

Hello, sunshine

2 texas’ ranking among u.s. states for rooftop solar potential

10 texas’ ranking among u.s. states for actual solar panel installations

13,000 Homes that can be powered by the 64.1 megawatts of solar panels texans installed in 2012

20

Percentage of u.s. annual electricity needs that could be met if every eligible home and business rooftop in the country installed solar panels

$12,938

Incentives offered by Oncor when a residential customer installs an 8.3 kilowatt solar panel system in 2013; visit takealoadofftexas.com for information

Sources: Solar Energy Industries Association, Green Mountain Energy and Oncor

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