Trip Doggett is the President of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas
Yana Skorobogatov contributed reporting to this article.
If the state encounters another scorching hot summer like we had last year, the choice will be between rolling blackouts or ramped-up conservation, said Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT ) President Tripp Doggett at a State House hearing today.
“If we have the same summer as last summer, we had to have conservation [last summer] and everyone made a tremendous difference during those peaks on the hot summer days of last August. We’d have to have that, plus some [more], to survive this summer without rotating outages,” Doggett testified before the House Committee on State Affairs.
The state grid is expected to have a reserve margin of electricity slightly higher than 13.75 percent this year. That’s the safety cushion of electric capacity that exceeds forecast demand. And that cushion will be thinner this year. Last year, the margin was 17 percent and Texas still came dangerously close to rolling blackouts on two occasions.
Part of the problem the committee is looking into is how to encourage more power plants to be built. That’s difficult in a deregulated maket. When questioned whether state agencies had looked into encouraging public-private partnerships to build more plants Donna Nelson, Chair of the Texas’s Public Utility Commission said “my perception is that our market is premised on private investment… so no we haven’t.”
Water demand in Texas is expected to rise 22 percent by 2060, according to the state’s Water Development Board. They say if we have another drought like the one of record from the 1950s, losses could total $116 billion by then.
One part of the report worth noting doesn’t come until the end, and that’s what can Texas learn from other places that have had to deal with growing populations, less water, and persistent drought. Let’s take a look.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Photo by Getty Images
The city of half a million discovered twenty years ago that its “aquifer was being drawn down twice as fast as nature could replenish it,” the report says. After enacting “aggressive” conservation and education campaigns, the city’s per capita usage fell by almost 38 percent. How’d they do it?
Pass on Grass. The city passed strict requirements on landscaping for new devlopments, “such as prohibiting the use of high-water-use grasses on more than 20 percent of a landscaped area.” Continue Reading →
Railroad Comissioner David J. Porter believes the report is flawed, but says more research should be done.
Looks like those hoping the conflict between Texas and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would cool down after Rick Perry’s departure from the presidential race are in for some disappointment. On Tuesday, the Railroad Commission of Texas, which regulates drilling in the state, fired a shot across the bow of the EPA. The message? Don’t touch our fracking.
In a letter to the EPA, all three members of the Railroad Commission call to re-classify a December draft report that found a link between fracking and water contamination in Wyoming. Instead of labeling it a “draft” report, they want the EPA to call it a “highly influential scientific assessment,” a request also made by several Republican senators in late January.
Why do they want the new language? The commission says that under White House guidelines, if an investigation or report is “controversial or precedent-setting” then it is first released as a “highly influential scientific study” before becoming a “draft” report.
If this seems like semantics, and you’re scratching your head as to why the Railroad Commission of Texas cares about an EPA report on wells in Wyoming, there’s a clear explanation. Continue Reading →
Dr. Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas at Austin is researching the links between fracking and earthquakes.
StateImpact Texas intern Yana Skorobogatov researched and reported this article.
Enduring an earthquake is one of the least desirable ways to spend one’s New Year’s Eve, but that’s exactly what happened for many residents of Youngstown, Ohio. On December 31, 2011, a record-breaking 4.0 magnitude quake hit the midwestern town and left many residents understandably shaken up. It was the eleventh quake to disrupt the relatively sesimologically sound state that year, and partygoers weren’t the only ones affected.
The Ohio quakes were linked by officials and seismologists to disposal Injection wells used for storing fluid from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” These wells go deep underground and can hold waste fluids from hundreds of fracking wells.
We recently sat down with Dr. Cliff Frohlich, Associate Director of and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, to learn more about the science behind artificially-induced earthquakes and figure out if Texas, too, is at risk.
Q: Can you give us a brief summary of the scientific community’s views about the possible connection between disposal wells and earthquakes?
A: In the scientific community, it was pretty much established in the 1960s that injecting fluids into the ground sometimes causes earthquakes. Prior to that, I don’t think people thought about it much. They had discovered that sometimes filling lakes will cause earthquakes. That was established in the 1930s when they built Lake Meade for the Hoover Dam. But in the 1960s there was a series of earthquakes in Denver that pretty much established this thought about fluid injection. Continue Reading →
Well, fortunately things did not go as planned. In early December, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted a drier and warmer winter than normal for Texas and much of the South.
Happily, those forecasts were only half-correct.
While the Texas winter has thus far definitely been warmer than usual (with the notable exception of snowed-in Midland), it has also been much wetter, providing desperately needed rains to the state.
Central and North Texas had rains between “150 and 300 percent of normal,” NOAA says in a report published today, equaling anywhere from two to seven inches of rain. Yet they also say that stations in southern Texas only had between “five and 50 percent of normal precipitation.” Across the state, the average rainfall overall was 2.24 inches. “For Texas, it was the twenty-eighth wettest January on record (1895-2012),” NOAA says, “and the second consecutive month with precipitation greater than two inches.” It was the first time for two months with above-average rains in Texas in two years.
Lt. Governor David Dewhurst wants the Texas Senate to look at several issues before the next legislature.
On Monday afternoon, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst released his interim charges to the Business & Commerce, Natural Resources and Government Organization Committees. What are interim charges? They’re issues that the respective senate committees look at leading up to the next legislative session, which is less than a year away. Some of these issues are being examined now so a bill will be ready to go once the legislature convenes. Essentially, the interim charges are a preview of what will be important for the next session, and as such, give us a sneak peak of what energy and environmental issues will be in the mix.
Dewhurst is currently running for the U.S. Senate, campaigning heavily against many policies of the Obama administration.
So let’s take a look.
Dewhurst directed the Natural Resources Committee to look at the potential effects of new and upcoming Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules on:
“Electric reliability in Texas”
“Affordability of electricity in Texas”
“Competitiveness of energy intensive sectors of the Texas economy, and make recommendations to reduce the regulatory burden and maintain a business-friendly climate.”
That last one is likely to get some attention. Dewhurst listed the specific EPA regulations he wants the committee to look at, and they mirror almost exactly the EPA rules that the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation lambasted yesterday at a conference, calling it an “approaching regulatory avalanche.”
The Lieutenant Governor also directed the committee to look at several other issues. Here are just a few that caught our eye: Continue Reading →
A snow-covered police car sits outside the Super Bowl in Dallas on February 4, 2011
It’s been an odd winter thus far for much of the country, with warmer-than-usual temperatures in the U.S. and above-average rains in parts of Texas. But what you probably didn’t know is that Texas is currently besting some typically colder climes in the snow department.
Here’s the official word from Justin Kenney, director of communications at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who tweeted this today:
More #snow this winter in Midland TX (19.5″) than Chicago (13.9), Twin Cities (14.9), Boston (7.8) or New York (7.2).
Residents of Maverick County are concerned about the effects of a new coal project.
The big news of the week was the town of Spicewood Beach, Texas running out of water. Tanker trucks are now hauling in water as their wells have begun to fail. We also brought you stories of yet another “boom” in West Texas and a coal project at the border that some worry is going to have a negative impact. In case you missed them, here are our five big stories from last week:
As drilling for oil and gas has surged in Texas, so have injuries and deaths at drilling rigs and well sites. It has become a significant concern to Federal regulators and to the industry. But there are promising efforts to reduce accidents. One of those was hatched in South Texas.
The number of workers killed in Texas “mining”, as the Department of Labor classifies oil and gas drilling, has risen in the past decade. Deaths rose from 35 in 2003 to a high of 49 in 2007 and totaled 45 in 2010.
In South Texas, where drilling has surged in the Eagle Ford shale with its rich deposits of gas and oil,  seven workers died on-the-job last year alone, up from three in 2010 according to Michael Rivera, director of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA’s) office in Corpus Christi. Continue Reading →
It wasn’t the first time the cyclist had been caught using too much water. In 2008, The New York Times reported that he had used 330,000 gallons of water in one month — a month he hadn’t even been home at his three acre, 14,475 square foot estate. “I’m a little shocked,” he told the paper at the time. “There’s no justification for that much water. I need to fix this.” Continue Reading →
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