'Catastrophic grid failure' a possibility for Texas solar/wind/battery storage

There have been many occasions where the cost of power in Texas has gone negative. (see: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/understanding-negative-pr... )

For this to happen there are a lot of factors that come into play but it indicates a downward price pressure on generation that is not going to go away. Storage and transmission are going to be the largest costs for the system going forward. These "ride through" upgrades make sense in the near term (generation side) but in the long term become just another cost that in theory could be put on the storage portion of the system (not in place yet).

Texas cutting itself off from the national grid, is now at the bleeding edge of renewables. 20 Years ago, that sentence would have gotten you laughed out of the state.

Australia went through this very same propaganda when a once in 100 year lightning storm caused a big grid interconnect failure, and a large part of an entire state was without power for weeks [1]

The Politicians at the time spun it as being caused by evil renewables, and the damage was done. A huge percentage of the population still believes that renewables cause power outages, cause prices to go up, and are the work of the devil.

Talk about putting a spin on something to ensure the legacy providers keeps making a profit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

"State utility regulators shot down efforts by ERCOT to impose new rules on large-scale battery sites, siding with operators who decried the grid operator’s rules as costly and discriminatory. The unanimous decision by the Public Utility Commission of Texas came after five months... It was touched off by a report from the grid operator intended to show grid-level batteries were unreliable without stricter rules. Texas battery operators, seven of which wrote letters ahead of the meeting opposing all or parts of the proposal, weren’t the only ones not buying it..."

https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/battery-ercot-c...

That said, investing more in the infrastructure is something that seems to have been put on hold/not addressed appropriately in the past in Texas so the Houston Chronicle running a story to bring this to the forefront doesn't rub me the wrong way either.

> Ryan Quint, a former NERC engineer who was the primary author on nearly all of the organization’s reports on the issue, is now a consultant working with Clearway Energy, one of the developers. In comments to ERCOT, Quint wrote that nearly 90% of the resources can address their issues with commercially reasonable fixes such as software upgrades, including the vast majority of solar issues in both of the Odessa events.

So just a little software is holding Texas back? Well that's gotta be inexpensive! What could software cost these days -- surely a couple 100k engineers and a month or two?

(the above line is a joke)

In all seriousness though, I do wonder if the unreasonable distribution of talented engineers to... trivial (but profitable) pursuits negatively effects some more nuts-and-bolts industries like this.

The current PGE rates basically redline a whole portion of the state.

Gray Davis got run out of town on the back of Enron's nonsense. The fact that there is abject lack of fall out from the current pricing is, outrageous.