As another brutally hot summer starts its descent upon San Antonio, CPS Energy officials say the municipally owned utility is “ready to go” — even as the state’s grid operator readies for what will likely be another record-breaking season regarding energy demand.
CPS Energy staff members briefed the utility’s five trustees Monday on the utility’s summer preparedness, noting Texas is likely to see a summer season that is very similar to last year’s in terms of weather and growth in demand. Last summer, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) saw the state reach 10 new all-time peak demand records, the highest of which was in August at more than 85,000 megawatts, with one megawatt being enough to power about 250 homes in Texas on a hot day.
Benny Ethridge, CPS Energy’s chief energy supply officer, said the utility has put together “a very good plan for the summer.” Ethridge told the trustees CPS Energy has focused on preparing its people, equipment and processes for the onslaught of heat, and they feel they are as ready as they can be.
“By June 1, we’ll be certified to ERCOT,” Ethridge said, referring to the pre-summer maintenance status of all CPS Energy’s power plants. “We’ll go through the season responding to things as needed, and use the lessons learned process to improve.”
Chief Customer Strategy Officer DeAnna Hardwick and Chief Energy Delivery Officer Richard Medina said their teams are also prepared to help the utility’s 1 million customers and to communicate with the public about conservation calls as needed. In 2022, CPS Energy launched a color-coded Energy Conservation Levels system for the summer months that helps communicate with customers how stable or dire the local energy constraints are and if higher levels of conservation are necessary.
CPS Energy’s President and CEO Rudy Garza told the San Antonio Report that getting through the summer is “going to take customers” participating in conservation calls to see the best results. He applauded the local response by CPS Energy customers last summer when the utility had to make its first Orange Day conservation call in September and noted that sort of heavy response may be needed again.
“When we ask them to back off their load and show up from a demand response and an energy efficiency standpoint, customers have to play a role,” he said. “There are going to be days where it gets tight. … I think this summer will probably look a lot like like last summer.”
Medina noted that ERCOT has put out notices that there are ongoing issues on some of the state’s transmission systems with transmission constraints that could cause rotating outages across South and Central Texas this summer, but Garza added lowering customer demand locally can help with that.
“You might see a localized load shed event in the Dallas-Fort Worth area or in the Houston area, or here potentially,” Garza said. “It hasn’t happened as long as I can remember, but in that moment, we have a different message for customers impacted than we do when it’s a system-wide load shed event.”
Transmission squeezes
ERCOT put out notices earlier this year that there could be issues on some of the state’s transmission systems this summer as power poles are changing. As power plants close and renewable powers come online, the power flows across the state are shifting, Medina explained to CPS Energy’s board of trustees Monday.
The change in generation mix has also resulted in increased distance between
generation sites and demand centers, ERCOT noted in a report published in December. Retired coal and gas generation were closer to large cities, whereas the most abundant wind and solar resources tend to be in more distant locations.
These changes are causing some limitations and possible bottlenecks within transmission power lines across the state, which became apparent last summer, Medina noted, when ERCOT experienced an energy emergency on Sept. 6, 2023, for the first time since Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
“What [ERCOT is] noticing is that when certain situations happen, there’s a lot of power coming from the South, and if the line trips, it may put us in an area where it could destabilize the power supply in South Texas,” he said.
These grid changes are also happening at a time of unprecedented population growth and energy demand in Texas. ERCOT continues to track nearly 40,000 megawatts of large load interconnection requests, having approved 3,188 megawatts to come on the system since January 2022 and waiting on another 9,446 to come online by Dec. 31, 2024. ERCOT is working to address these transmission concerns, in part because it has been ordered to do so by the state legislature.
“There’s a lot of projects — ERCOT has issued tons of projects — to rebuild transmission systems, they just take a long time,” Medina said.
Should there be transmission squeezes this summer that lead to regional rotating blackouts, CPS Energy is ready to communicate with customers about it, Garza said.
“We’re trying to figure out, what’s the simplest way we can explain that, ‘Hey, you’re going to see this impact for the next couple hours?'” Garza said. “[We’d want customers to know] that it’s not a result of our plants going down or anything like that … so we do have specific messaging if that happens.”
Demand response
With no statewide demand response program in place despite continued calls for it by state energy experts, CPS Energy staff is “making sure that we leverage the demand response programs that we have,” Hardwick said.
Demand response programs are programs that provide payments to energy consumers who agree to reduce their energy demand during times of electricity grid stress. CPS Energy has had demand response programs in place since 2006, although they have been expanded over the last few years following Winter Storm Uri.
“We had a very successful year last year; we had commercial customers that continue to step up to help reduce the burden on our residential customers — both through our demand response program and through a voluntary program — and we’re continuing those relationships and making sure that we are in contact with those largest customers,” Hardwick said.
CPS Energy is also trying to work with residential customers who are opted into its home demand response program, Hardwick said, to make sure they are aware of what products and services they have to control their own electricity use.
Garza stressed that while commercial customers are really “where the demand response is,” residential customers must also try to play a part in helping the grid this summer.
“I think San Antonio — our community is doing our part — I think it’s the rest of the state that’s got some work to do on creating additional opportunities for customer programs,” Garza told the San Antonio Report.
Garza added he believes the Public Utility Commission of Texas “is working on that.” In a recent opinion article, state grid expert Doug Lewin noted despite the fact the state legislature passed Senate Bill 1699, which requires the PUC to implement strategies that reduce demand, the PUC has yet to announce any sort of plans to explore them.
