For years, Texas has struggled with how to solve its energy crunch: forecasts said not enough power plants were being built to meet the demands of a growing population and a booming state. But it turns out the state’s supplies are likely adequate. Despite all the growth in Texas, peak power demand hasn’t increased as fast as expected.
To understand why, it helps to start with those long, hot Texas summer afternoons just six months ago.
“Our electricity problems in Texas are almost entirely because of air conditioning in the afternoons in the summer,” said Michael Webber, Deputy Director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas. “In fact, in the whole year we have an excess of electricity, except for a few hours, in a few weeks of the year.”
That problem with the Texas electricity market isn’t unique.
“Across the nation, we have something like a trillion dollars of capital in our power plants And we use those power plants on average 42 percent of the time,” Webber said. “This is incredibly irrational.”
But what if you could shift power use? What if you could incentivize people to use less during that time of peak demand? A relatively recent development could be the answer. It’s called ‘Demand Response.’
Workers clean tarballs from the BP oil spill on Waveland beach December 6, 2010 in Waveland, Mississippi.
Bad as the BP Deepwater Horizon spill was with its oil tainting miles of Texas beaches (36 miles to be exact, according to the state), there is now restoration money floating into Texas.
As part of an agreement reached in 2011 for “early oil spill restoration,” BP is paying Texas and four other Gulf Coast states a total of $1 billion. Texas’s portion is $100 million.
But in Texas, there is disagreement over what deserves the most immediate attention, a debate that goes something like this: Restrooms v. Wetlands.
A picture provided to StateImpact Texas from property rights activist Julia Trigg Crawford of what she said was work on the Keystone pipeline.
Before the oil started flowing in earnest through the southern part of the Keystone XL pipeline last week, land owner and property rights activist Julia Trigg Crawford noticed work crews unearthing parts of of the pipeline. When StateImpact called Crawford for a quote about the pipeline’s activation, she mentioned that activity.
“Track hoes, skids, water trucks, electrical trucks and construction crews showed up,” Crawford said. “They unearthed the pipeline, attached wires and sensors, wrapped it in something and then covered it up.”
Crawford added that TransCanada, the company that owns the pipeline, told her it had been installing temperature sensors. StateImpact Texas emailed TransCanada for confirmation, but did not hear back by the piece’s Wednesday morning deadline, a fact noted in the original article.
Wednesday evening TransCanada sent an email explaining the work.
Julia Trigg Crawford has several hundred acres of land in northeast Texas. She lost her recent challenge to the Keystone XL pipeline.
Update: TransCanada has emailed a response to this report. You can read about that here.
The Keystone XL Pipeline runs under Julia Trigg Crawford’s North Texas farm. It’s been carrying crude for over a month. But today business is scheduled to open in earnest on the controversial pipeline, with oil flowing from Cushing, Oklahoma to refineries in Texas. That’s why she’s worried about an “unusual flurry of activity” she noticed over the weekend.
“Track hoes, skids, water trucks, electrical trucks and construction crews showed up,” Crawford tells StateImpact Texas. “They unearthed the pipeline, attached wires and sensors, wrapped it in something and then covered it up.”
She says TransCanada — the company that owns the pipeline — later told her it was installing heat sensors. (Representatives from TransCanada did not respond to an interview request by deadline). But her interest in the activity goes beyond that isolated incident.
Crawford has long battled the pipeline company over its use of eminent domain, where the company has claimed private property to route the pipeline through Texas. Since she and other opponents of the project have failed to stop it, they now plan to keep it under intense scrutiny. The southern leg of the Keystone XL may become the most watched pipeline in the country.
Air pollution monitoring station at Croix Memorial Park in Manvel
At the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), they’re very familiar with a park in Manvel, a small town 15 miles south of downtown Houston. It’s a place where prairie land is quickly being turned into subdivisions but it still retains a rural appearance.
In Croix Memorial Park, between a soccer field and a playground, is one of the TCEQ’s air pollution monitoring stations, one of over 20 spread across the Houston area.
For some reason, the monitor in Manvel shows that ozone levels here are among the worst in the metro area. Consistently. And they haven’t come down as they have over the past decade at other monitoring sites, some of them near areas with far more sources of pollution from vehicles or industries.
“So the question is why, what’s different about that site,” said David Brymer, director of air quality at the TCEQ. “It’s south of town. Houston’s not really known for consistent north winds that would blow the urban core emissions towards that monitor. “ Continue Reading →
An Azle resident signs up to receive more information from environmentalists.
Just 10 days after a contentious public hearing with state officials, residents in Reno and Azle gathered Monday night to try and make sense of the swarm of earthquakes that keep rocking their part of North Texas. The latest quake hit just hours before the public meeting.
Several hundred people listened to a panel of speakers that included the former mayor of Dish, Calvin Tillman.
“I’m not some rocket scientist,” Tillman told the crowd. “Just a normal guy, who moved to the country, who got pissed off by the oil and gas industry, just like you.”
Tillman is working with environmental groups like Earthworks Action and the North Central Texas Communities Alliance to seek tougher restrictions and regulations on the oil and gas industry. Some point to gas drilling wastewater injection wells as the culprit of the quakes. No industry representatives spoke Monday night. Continue Reading →
Texas has by far the most miles of natural gas pipelines and is the state with the most accidents. But according to federal pipeline regulators, Texas also grants the most exemptions (along with Florida) regarding who must notify a pipeline or utility company before digging.
Federal data show that in the past decade, 11 percent of serious pipeline accidents in Texas were caused by work crews doing excavations. According to CenterPoint Energy, a Houston comnpany that distributes natural gas to over 3 million customers in Texas and other states, over half the damage to its pipelines last year was “caused by an excavator failing to Call 811.” Continue Reading →
A pickup truck equipped to detect pollution is a project of Rice University and the University of Houston
At Rice University in Houston, environmental engineer Rob Griffin is working on a project that uses a pollution detection device as big as a pickup truck. Actually, it is a pickup truck.
The mobile pollution lab has been roaming the streets and highways of Houston since this fall. The project won’t be done for at least another year.
“We are going to have a lot of data. This is going to be an incredibly massive project,” Griffin told StateImpact. Continue Reading →
One speaker asked fellow residents to raise their hands if they've heard a loud "boom" accompanying recent earthquakes.
Azle, Texas – “I’ve got a crack in my hallway,” chuckled Marion LeBert as he stood in the parking lot of Azle High School.
“Oh my! We have sink holes in our yard. And they’ve gotten bigger since these earthquakes,” commiserated Tracy Napier.
The two were among hundreds of townspeople hoping to get answers at a meeting hosted last night by the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas industry regulators. The area, in Parker and Tarrant counties, didn’t experience earthquakes until recently. Now, it’s seen a swarm of over twenty minor ones in the last two months, troubling residents and causing damage to some homes. The earthquakes would be the topic of discussion.
Mose Buchele
Marion LeBert, Tracy Napier and Tommy Eldridge (left to right) traded earthquake stories before the meeting.
“I just want to kind of sit back and see what [state regulators] are gonna say,” LeBert told StateImpact Texas. “I’ve lived here 20 years and we never had anything like this till they started all the drilling and the fracking and stuff. All I want to do is get the truth out of them.”
Scientific research has shown how similar quakes are caused when waste water from oil and gas drilling is injected into underground disposal wells. This area of North Texas has many such disposal wells. But the link has not been publicly acknowledged by the Railroad Commission (though agency staff agree it exists in internal emails and PowerPoint presentations obtained by StateImpact Texas). Ahead of last night’s meeting, Railroad Commissioner David Porter had said he would would talk about plans to deal with the quakes, signaling that the Commission was willing to publicly offer some answers.
As the meeting got underway, it quickly became clear that plan had changed.
Mose Buchele/StateImpactWind turbines in West Texas help produce record amounts of electricity for the state.
By New Year’s Day, the network of transmission lines that comprise Texas’ “Competitive Renewable Energy Zone” [CREZ] will be fully operational, bringing electricity from wind turbines in West Texas and the Panhandle to points east. Many of the lines are already active (and have contributed to record-breaking percentages of Texas electricity coming from wind), but the Jan. 1 deadline is cause for celebration among those who have long prided Texas’ role as a leader in wind power.
“I like to compare it to something like the highway for electricity,” Russell Smith, Executive Director of the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association, told StateImpact Texas.
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