Texas power price spike is the latest unintended consequence:
Wind power may have played role in Australia, Britain outages:
The road to a world powered by renewable energy is littered with unintended
consequences. Like a 40,000% surge in electricity prices.
Texas power prices jumped from less than $15 to as much as $9,000 a
megawatt-hour this month as coal plant retirements and weak winds left the
region on the brink of blackouts during a heat wave. It’s a phenomenon
playing out worldwide. Germany averted three blackouts of its own in June
and has seen prices both spike and plunge below zero within days as it
swaps out coal and nuclear energy for wind and solar. In the U.K., more
than a million homes lost power on Aug. 9, in part because a wind farm
tripped offline.
The recent stumbles serve as a warning shot to the rest of the world as
governments work to displace aging nuclear reactors and coal-fired power
plants with cheaper and cleaner renewable energy. Grid operators, policy
makers and power providers are learning the hard way that losing massive,
around-the-clock generators can be a challenge, if not carefully planned.
“We have to have systems in place to make sure we still have enough
generation on the grid – or else, in the best case, we have a blackout, and
in the worst case, we have some kind of grid collapse,” said Severin
Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California at
Berkeley, where state officials have a goal of getting all power from clean
energy resources by 2045.
There is no easy solution.
In Germany, grid operators were forced to tap emergency reserves to avoid
outages in the heat of June as some blamed bad wind generation forecasts.
Power prices there surged at times on the prospect of shortages and plunged
below zero at other times when solar generation flooded the system.
A group representing the nation’s biggest power suppliers warned that the
grid may become increasingly unstable as the government orders coal and
nuclear plants to shut. “By 2023 at the latest, we will be running with
eyes wide open into a shortfall in secure capacity,” said Stefan Kapferer,
a managing director for the group BDEW.
Governors of Germany’s coal regions have called on German Chancellor Angela
Merkel to coordinate a carefully planned exit from the fossil fuel without
sending power prices soaring and risking blackouts. The country is
meanwhile expected to grow increasingly dependent on imports from
neighbors, some of which are dealing with their own energy revolutions.
In the U.K., where coal once provided nearly all electricity, inquiries
into the August blackout found that a lightning strike on a transmission
line north of London caused a natural gas plant and a giant offshore wind
farm to drop off the grid. While officials are still probing the exact
cause, National Grid Plc said in a preliminary report to regulators that
it’s looking into better ways to incorporate renewables.
“Wind generation, solar and interconnectors are different to the
conventional electricity generation sources,” National Grid said in the report.
In Australia, regulators this month took four wind farm operators to court,
alleging that their facilities contributed to a massive 2016 blackout. The
incident has sparked a debate over whether a nation so rich in coal and
natural gas resources should even allow the grid to become so dependent on
renewable power.
Some grids have taken on large volumes of solar and wind without widespread
blackouts. California, for example, often gets more than 40% of its power
from renewable energy resources in the early afternoon and regularly sees
its power prices drop below zero. Texas, which has more wind power than
anywhere in America, is home to some of the cheapest wholesale electricity
in the country. Renewable energy is now the most affordable source of new
power generation in two-thirds of the world.
Clean energy advocates point to batteries as a solution to renewables’
intermittent nature. Companies including Tesla Inc. and Germany’s Sonnen
GmbH have developed massive energy-storage systems that can stockpile
electricity when demand is low and dispatch it when it’s needed. Utilities
have also pressed for stronger transmission networks.
The Trump administration has argued the only way to keep a grid resilient
is to keep money-losing coal and nuclear plants online with bailouts. Those
efforts have gained little traction, but states are carving out subsidies
to save reactors from early retirement, sparking a review by federal
regulators that has already delayed the largest annual power auction in the
U.S. by months.
Meanwhile, in Texas, the grid is becoming increasingly exposed to the
swings of wind generation. The run-up in electricity prices earlier this
month was in part because generation from farms sank to the lowest level in
months.
Unlike Texas, some regions use capacity markets to ensure there’s enough
power to keep the lights on. In these, plants get paid to guarantee power
during a certain time period, even if it turns out the market doesn’t need
their electricity.
There are ways, said Daniel Shawhan, a research fellow with the Resources
for the Future think tank, to make the switch to cleaner energy “such that
the probability of a blackout does not go up.”
(Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority stakeholder of Bloomberg
LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has committed $500 million to
launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at closing the remaining
coal-powered plants in the U.S. by 2030 and slowing the construction of new
gas plants.)
With assistance by Chris Martin, and Brian Parkin
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