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Texas grid vulnerable to blackouts during severe winter weather, even with new preparations, ERCOT estimates show

Snow surrounds an Austin Energy station on Feb. 18. (Sergio Flores/The Texas Tribune)
By Erin Douglas
Electricity outages in Texas could occur this winter if the state experiences a cold snap that forces many power plants offline at the same time as demand for power is high, according to an analysis by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The outages could occur despite better preparations by power plants to operate in cold weather.
Heading into the winter, ERCOT considered five extreme scenarios in a risk assessment of the state's power supply. The grid operator estimates both how much electricity Texans are expected to demand and how much electricity power plants are expected to produce ahead of each season.
Following the widespread February power outages that left millions without electricity for several days, ERCOT changed those assessments to calculate what would happen if extreme conditions occurred simultaneously — like what happened this year.
The calculations show the power grid's vulnerability to the cumulative impact of multiple pressures that could leave the system short of a significant amount of power. Power grids must keep supply and demand in balance at all times. When Texas' grid falls below its safety margin of 2,300 megawatts of extra supply, ERCOT, the grid operator, starts taking additional precautions to avoid blackouts, such as asking residents to conserve power.
The calculations for severe risk this winter show that it wouldn't take a storm as bad as the one in February, when hundreds of people died, to take the grid offline.
The most severe scenario considered by ERCOT for this winter — very high demand for power, extensive natural gas and other fossil fuel outages, and excessively low renewable power production — still does not capture the amount of power lost during February. For two days in February, Texas averaged 34,000 megawatts of outages, according to a recent federal report on the crisis. ERCOT's seasonal assessment for this winter estimates that the state, in the worst case scenario, could have only about 10,000 to 19,000 megawatts of total outages at any one time, assuming better preparation by power plants for this winter as opposed to last.
"As part of our comprehensive planning, we also reviewed a number of low-probability, high-impact scenarios," said Chris Schein, a spokesperson for ERCOT, in a statement. "Generators across the state have made improvements in power plant weatherization."
Regulators in October finalized a rule that requires power plants to use "best efforts" to ensure plants can operate this winter and requires them to fix "acute" issues from the February 2021 winter storm.
ERCOT also estimated that Texans would demand, at most, about 73,000 megawatts of electricity at any given time, based on weather from a decade ago in 2011 and economic forecasts for 2020. But during the February power crisis, experts estimate that Texans needed about 77,000 megawatts to keep the power on.
"We've had years of poor planning of peak [demand] by ERCOT," said Alison Silverstein, an expert on Texas' electricity system who formerly worked at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Public Utility Commission of Texas. She spoke during a public event hosted by the environmental group the Sierra Club on Saturday. "ERCOT's power market has historically been managed to minimize costs, not to assure excellent reliability."
Four of the five extreme risk scenarios ERCOT considered would leave the grid short a significant amount of power, which would trigger outages for residents.
The extreme scenarios have a low chance of occurring, ERCOT emphasises in its report, and the grid operator estimates more power generation will be available than last winter.
Under typical winter grid conditions, the ERCOT report said, there will be sufficient power available to serve the state.
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A $6,000 cockatoo named Lemon Grab was stolen from a pet store Sunday afternoon, owner Kelsey Fernandez said. (Kelsey Fernandez)
A big-money bird has been stolen from a northwest Austin pet store.
Kelsey Fernandez, the owner of a $6,000 sulphur and citron-crested cockatoo named Lemon Grab, said the emotional support animal was taken from the Gallery of Pets store, around closing time on Sunday.
"I've struggled with mental illness my entire life, and ever since I got him I've been doing so much better," Fernandez told Austonia.
The $6k cockatoo is young and will starve unless he is fed by hand, Fernandez said.
In a surveillance video, a man appears to have something under his shirt as he and two others exit the business around the same time the store believes that Lemon Grab was stolen.
Fernandez said a report has been filed with the Austin Police Department with an $1,000 reward for his return.
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(Pexels)
Introverts and personal space lovers may not want to make the move to Austin anytime soon: The Texas capital saw a bigger increase in one-bedroom rent prices than almost any other U.S. city in April, according to a Rent.com report.
Austin's one-bedroom rent has more than doubled—a 112% increase—from April 2021 to 2022, the report said. Only Oklahoma City saw a higher year-over-year increase with a 133% jump.
Austin also had the fourth-highest increase in two-bedroom rent, with a 50% increase in the past year. The city joined a nationwide trend where rents were up 8.3% year-over-year across the U.S, a trend exacerbated by a 6.2% increase in inflation in the same time period.
But "not everyone is experiencing inflation the same way," Redfin Deputy Chief Economist Taylor Marr said in the report, and a brunt of the load has gone to cities with more move-ins. While over 90% of state rental markets increased in the last year, that jump was seen most in Sun Belt states, including Texas, Arizona and Florida.
Even with breakneck increases in rent, however, Austin's rent prices still haven't cracked the top 10: the city's one-bedroom apartments are the 12th most expensive in the nation with an average price of $2,918. Meanwhile, its two-bedrooms fall behind Texas cities Frisco, Dallas and Plano and come out 34th on the list with a $2,302 average monthly rent.
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