San Antonio’s city-owned energy utility has a plan to allow it to disconnect from the state’s power grid, at least temporarily, during times of high demand.
That effort got a major boost from the federal government last month, when CPS Energy was awarded a $30.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for innovation projects aimed at improving grid reliability.
“We’re really going to focus on a microgrid, basically being able to disconnect from the electrical grid and have a self-sustaining ecosystem that can run under temporary outage conditions,” said Ricardo Maldonado, CPS Energy’s vice president of transmission and distribution engineering and grid, in an interview Tuesday.
“If something were to happen, they could disconnect from the grid … still provide power emergency services and basically be in an autonomous mode, then reconnect when the grid comes back and become stable again,” he said.
Grid under scrutiny
The reliability of Texas’ electric grid has been under tremendous scrutiny since Winter Storm Uri took 246 lives in 2021, including deaths from hypothermia during days of power outages.
CPS Energy also faces wrongful death lawsuits after that storm, but has fared much better than other Texas utilities throughout recent extreme weather events, including December 2022’s Winter Storm Elliott, which led to sustained power outages in Austin.
Over the summer, when the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, was calling for conservation to avoid power outages, CPS Energy was able not only to maintain service, but also sell the electricity it produced onto the state’s power grid.
“We made it through probably the most difficult summer on record,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said Wednesday in a City Council meeting about CPS Energy’s resiliency efforts. Of Winter Storm Elliott, he added, CPS Energy was “able to keep the lights on because of the investments that we’ve been making in the operations of the plants.”
“That, in my mind, shows us that what we’ve been doing is working,” Nirenberg said. “… We are improving and we’re making the right investments.”
In March, Nirenberg, City Manager Erik Walsh and CPS Energy President and CEO Rudy Garza met with Department of Energy officials in Washington, D.C., to push for federal funding to help those efforts.
The DOE’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program was created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to foster innovative solutions for extreme weather and climate change.
The agency distributed $3.46 billion to 58 projects in 44 states in the program’s first round. San Antonio was the only Texas city to receive a grant.
The federal funding requires a $30.2 million match from CPS Energy, which will be factored into the utility’s budget in the coming years. The utility’s work will be studied by the DOE over the next five years.
“What we learn here will be shared with our utility partners, through the DOE, to help them also deploy microgrids and smart grid corridors,” Maldonado said.
Innovation hub
CPS Energy officials believe microgrids could function like a generator in the case of a widespread power outage. They also could be used at times when the state grid is stressed, like when ERCOT asked people to raise their thermostats over the summer.
“This would be an instance where this microgrid can start, can disconnect from the grid, easing that that burden for the ERCOT load and run autonomous off of the battery for four hours, let’s say, enough to ride through the peak,” he said.
In addition to the microgrids, CPS Energy plans to use the money to explore “smart substations,” which seek to pair battery power with solar so renewable sources can be deployed more reliably even when they aren’t actively producing.
It is also researching what the utility calls “smart corridors,” which use sensors to detect when problems have occurred and allows the utility to troubleshoot them remotely.
CPS Energy officials say the grant money is coming at a time when the utillity already need to replace some control systems. If successful, the evolving technology could soon be integrated at scale.
“[We can] prove out these technologies in these little test beds, make sure they work, get some competency, some expertise under our belt,” Maldonado said. “From there, we can grow it, and this will essentially create the foundation for how we deploy microgrids going forward.”
On Wednesday, CPS Energy officials presented plans to pursue more federal money in an era of historic infrastructure funding. Among the reasons DOE liked the utility’s most recent proposal, they said, was that the reliability projects would benefit San Antonio’s “disadvantaged community.”
“We didn’t used to do a lot of federal grants in the past because we didn’t like some of the conditions that came with those dollars,” Garza said. “Now, we’re getting into a space, working with the city and our community partners, where we’re getting better at managing the compliance aspects of what these grants bring with them.”
CPS Energy is a financial supporter of the San Antonio Report. For a full list of business members, click here.
