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.

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

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.”