Study: Texas Grid Over Relies on Natural Gas to Restore Power After Blackouts
(Reuters) — The Texas electric grid is too dependent on natural gas-fired backup power generators after blackouts, U.S. regulators found on Tuesday in a study that also called for gas suppliers and electric utilities to sync their plans to recover from outages.
The joint study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), North American Electric Reliability Corp (NERC), and six regional entities which encompass nearly 400 million customers, looked at outages in Texas during the 2021 Winter Storm Uri.
The freeze left more than 4.5 million people without power, some for days, as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) sought to prevent a grid collapse due to the suspension of an unusually high amount of generation.
As per a 2021 report on Uri by regulators, all 28 of ERCOT's "blackstart" resources, which can start up without drawing power from the grid, use natural gas as their primary fuel, and during Uri, over 80% of them failed or faced issues in starting.
ERCOT has defined processes to procure blackstart resources and verify their sufficiency, but it "relies heavily on natural gas as fuel" for those resources, the study released on Tuesday found.
"Where feasible, grid operators should incorporate a variety of fuel and non-fuel options into their blackstart system restoration plans," FERC said in a statement about the study.
The study highlighted "the need for the electric and natural gas industries to work together to develop a joint blackstart system restoration plan that considers extreme cold weather conditions and the mutual interdependence of these two complex and important industries."
It recommended that gas suppliers raise the priority of delivering gas to blackstart resources, while power producers identify and address the limitations of such resources, store natural gas off-site for blackouts, and test starting dual-fuel resources without any primary fuel.
Last month, FERC and NERC urged lawmakers to fill a regulatory blind spot to maintain reliable supply of natural gas during extreme cold weather.
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