Advanced Energy Perspectives

Texas is in the midst of a severe and historic winter weather event, which has led to the worst outages the state has experienced in decades. With over 4 million Texans losing power, all eyes are on the state’s grid manager and market operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), and market participants like power plant owners and operators, demand side resources, and other grid assets as they work around the clock to restore the grid to normal operating conditions. Defenders of the energy status quo are also using the occasion to cast doubt on advanced energy technologies – especially wind power, on which Texas is a national leader. But they’ve got it exactly backwards. The troubles in Texas point to the need for more advanced energy, not less. 

By now, it is no secret that distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop solar, energy storage, customer-owned generation, demand response, electric vehicles, and energy efficiency can save Texas billions of dollars over the coming years. A report published by Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance (TAEBA)  showed that DERs could deliver $5.47 billion of value over 10 years by prolonging the use of existing, functional utility infrastructure and by better integrating DERs into electricity markets. But the value of DERs is not just in the future. Rather, DERs are already providing Texas businesses and Texas residents with many benefits, including reliability, resilience, and cost savings. Read on for five examples of DERs currently at work in the Lone Star State.

In a win for advanced energy, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) declined to revise the current mechanism for allocating transmission losses at its Jan. 17 meeting, supporting a position taken by the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance (TAEBA). The PUCT also took another positive step by opening a review of EV-related issues to prepare for expected growth.