Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate

There’s a New Kind of Energy Risk: Cold Winter Mornings

Freezing temperatures plus late sunrises have led to some close calls in Texas.

A solar panel.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Texas grid has had two close calls already this week, leading ERCOT, the electricity market that covers about 90% of the state, to ask households, businesses, and government agencies to conserve energy due to high demand. These calls for moderation are nothing new — ERCOT issued several of them issued this summer, when temperatures were over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in much of the state. What’s new is that these calls weren’t coming on sweltering afternoons, but rather on freezing mornings.

Traditionally, we start to get nervous about the electric grid in the summertime around sunset. With air conditioners running and people getting home from work, demand for electricity goes up just as a major source of it (that is, solar power) starts to taper off. This effect is known in California as the “duck curve,” and in Texas as the “dead armadillo curve,” referring to the shape of graphs showing hourly demand on the grid.

The basic issue on very cold days like the ones Texas has been experiencing is that people wake up and start consuming electricity — especially heat, which is largely electric in Texas — before the sun comes up. Solar power provides around a fifth of the state’s electricity in the afternoon, even in winter. But at 7 a.m. on a January morning in Austin, the sun is nowhere to be found. Add on the fact that the rest of the system, especially its natural gas production system and power plants, is at risk of weather-related issues — sometimes literally freezing — and winter, especially winter mornings, become very touch-and-go.

While the Texas grid is unique in its relatively free-market organization and isolation from the rest of the country, it is certainly not unique in experiencing winter — if anything, more of the country may start to look like Texas. Not every decarbonized energy system would be at the mercy of very cold mornings, and batteries for storing excess electricity on the grid can help fill gaps when solar is unavailable. But decarbonization nationwide will necessarily lead to load growth, which means that making it so you can get out of bed and keep your toes warm will put pressure on electricity systems everywhere.

New England’s grid is forecasting that its winter peak demand will increase around 3% per year, three times faster than the summer peak, with some 3,000 megawatts of that 6,000 to 9,000 MW projected increase coming from electrification of home heating. In New York, grid planners expect heating-related demand to double over 30 years, and even surpass summer demand by around 2040 thanks to a combination of electric vehicle adoption and the use of heat pumps for home heating. In Quebec, which features a unique combination of extremely cold winter temperatures and plentiful green energy in the form of hydropower from its massive dams, plus home heating systems that are mostly electric already, demand tends to peak on very cold winter days.

While Texas is unlikely to pursue climate policy as aggressive as New England, New York, or (shudders) Canada, it does have a burgeoning renewables sector and an incumbent electrified home heating system that leaves it vulnerable to weather-dictated swings in demand.

And Texas has been uncommonly cold lately. In Austin, temperatures have remained below freezing since very early Sunday morning, dipping as low as 18 degrees on Monday and Tuesday mornings. In Houston, temperatures got as low as 20 on Tuesday morning. The system burst through its January demand record by 5,000 megawatts early this week, breaking a record set in late 2022 during Winter Storm Elliott.

This time, the grid was able to meet the high winter demand without malfunctioning, unlike during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, when much of the state’s generation system tripped offline for days, resulting in prolonged blackouts and hundreds of deaths.

Since Winter Storm Uri, advocates and analysts have bemoaned that while Texas does have electrified heating, it tends to be inefficient resistance heat (think electric furnaces and baseboard heating) instead of more efficient heat pumps, which is then called upon to heat homes built with little or sometimes no insulation. At very low temperatures, according to one expert report on Winter Storm Uri, “uninsulated homes cannot be heated effectively.” Texas only adopted a mandatory building code in 2001; last year, the state’s Governor Greg Abbott vetoed a bill that would have updated codes for new buildings in the course of a fight with the state legislature over property taxes.

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Q&A

You, Too, Can Protect Solar Panels Against Hail

A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.

This week's interview subject.
Heatmap Illustration

This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Hotspots

The Pro-Renewables Crowd Gets Riled Up

And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.

  • Activists came together on Earth Day to protest the Trump administration’s decision to issue a stop work order on Equinor’s Empire Wind project. It’s the most notable rally for offshore wind I’ve seen since September, when wind advocates protested offshore opponents at the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island.
  • Esther Rosario, executive director of Climate Jobs New York, told me the rally was intended to focus on the jobs that will be impacted by halting construction and that about a hundred people were at the rally – “a good half of them” union members or representing their unions.
  • “I think it’s important that the elected officials that are in both the area and at the federal level understand the humans behind what it means to issue a stop-work order,” she said.

2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Spotlight

How a Carbon Pipeline Is Turning Iowa Against Wind

Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.

Iowa.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.

Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow