POWER PEOPLE TO THE

Most of us don’t think about electricity outside of two scenarios: our monthly bill is due, or our power goes out.

We’ve lived with power lines so long that they’ve become a part of the landscape. We no longer notice them running down our streets or along our highways.

Our entire modern lives rely upon the energy grid, yet we don’t know much of anything about it, even though it runs right through our neighborhood.

What is it? Where is it? What if something happens to it? c ould we run out of power?

this month, while our air-conditioners are running full blast, might be a good time to find out.

We’ve heard about it and vaguely knoW it’s responsible for ensuring that our DVRs record our favorite shows, our laptops and mobile phones can be recharged, and our air-conditioners continue humming to stave off the summer heat. (Plus it powers our lights, refrigerators and other such minor things.)

But where is the energy grid? It sounds obscure, but it’s actually in plain sight all around us.

“It’s not a grid in a sense of square grid,” says Bill Muston, manager of research and development for Oncor, which delivers electricity to Dallas homes. He instead describes it as “radial.”

Those giant high-voltage transmission lines around the city, the kind that run along the Tollway, for example? Power generated by gas, coal, wind and other sources at 550 plants throughout the state travels through lines like those and into Dallas.

The high-voltage transmission lines carry up to 345,000 volts and can transmit anywhere between 50 and 500 megawatts of energy at a time, which power between 10,000 and 100,000 homes at peak demand. That power then “goes through transformers to step it down to 12,500 volts, and those are called substations,” Muston says. Neither Oncor nor other electrical entities publish maps of the grid flow or substations for security reasons, but “there’s no secret,” Muston says. A large grouping of metal poles and wires in a gated area is hard to miss.

NaTural gas 44.6 percent

Coal 33.8 percent

NuClear 11.8 percent

WiNd 9.2 percent

Hydro, biomass, solar aNd sTorage 0.6 percent

Source: electric reliability council of texas, Inc. (ercOt)

The substations then transmit the power to various “districts” around the city and deliver it to the transformers and utility lines near our homes. One transformer — what looks like a cylindrical tube attached to a utility line serves between four and eight homes, Muston says. The transformers convert the electricity into either 240 volts, powering electric stoves or dryers, or 120 volts, powering just about everything else in a home.

The high voltage transmission grid is networked across the state, so “if you lose one segment of it, it just keeps going,” Muston says.

“The outages occur more at the district level where you have trees fall onto lines or drivers hit poles.”

Story by Kate Galbraith, The Texas Tribune

TexaS’ SeceSSioniST inclinaTionS do have one modern outlet: the electric grid. There are three grids in the Lower 48 states: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection — and Texas.

The Texas grid is called ERCOT, and it is run by an agency of the same name — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT does not actually cover all of Texas. El Paso is on another grid, as is the upper Panhandle and a chunk of East Texas. This presumably has to do with the history of various utilities’ service territories and the remoteness of the non-ERCOT locations (for example the Panhandle is closer to Kansas than to Dallas, notes Kenneth Starcher of the Alternative Energy Institute in Canyon).

The separation of the Texas grid from the rest of the country has its origins in the evolution of electric utilities early last century. In the decades after Thomas Edison turned on the country’s first power plant in Manhattan in 1882, small generating plants sprouted across Texas, bringing electric light to cities. Later, particularly during World War I, utilities began to link themselves together. These ties, and the accompanying transmission network, grew further during World War II, when several Texas utilities joined together to form the Texas Interconnected System, which allowed them to link to the big dams along Texas rivers and also send extra electricity to support the ramped-up factories aiding the war effort.

The Texas Interconnected System — which for a long time was actually operated by two discrete entities, one for northern Texas and one for southern Texas — had another priority: staying out of the reach of federal regulators. In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with overseeing interstate electricity sales. By not crossing state lines, Texas utilities avoided being subjected to federal rules.

“Freedom from federal regulation was a cherished goal — more so because Texas had no regulation until the 1970s,” writes Richard D. Cudahy in a 1995 article, “The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection.” (Self-reliance was also made easier in Texas, especially in the early days, because the state has substantial coal, natural gas and oil resources of its own to fuel power plants.)

ERCOT was formed in 1970, in the wake of a major blackout in the Northeast in November 1965, and it was tasked with managing grid reliability in accordance with national standards. The agency assumed additional responsibilities following electric deregulation in Texas a decade ago. The ERCOT grid remains beyond the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which succeeded the Federal Power Commission and regulates interstate electric transmission.

Historically, the Texas grid’s independence has been violated a few times. Once was during World War II, when special provisions were made to link Texas to other grids, according to Cudahy. Another episode occurred in 1976 after a Texas utility, for reasons relating to its own regulatory needs, deliberately flipped a switch and sent power to Oklahoma for a few hours. This event, known as the “Midnight Connection,” set off a major legal battle that could have brought Texas under the jurisdiction of federal regulators, but it was ultimately resolved in favor of continued Texan independence.

Even today, ERCOT is also not completely isolated from other grids — as was evident during winter 2011 when the state imported some power from Mexico during the rolling blackouts. ERCOT has three ties to Mexico and — as an outcome of the “Midnight Connection” battle — it also has two ties to the eastern U.S. grid, though they do not trigger federal regulation for ERCOT. All can move power commercially as well as be used in emergencies, according to ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark. A possible sixth interconnection project, in Rusk County, is being studied, and another ambitious proposal, called Tres Amigas, would link the three big U.S. grids together in New Mexico, though Texas’ top utility regulator has shown little enthusiasm for participating.

Bottom line: Texas has its own grid to avoid dealing with the feds.