Dive Brief:

• Texas load growth forecasts for 2030 have soared by 40 GW in a single year, necessitating “a new era of planning,” Electric Reliability Council of Texas President and CEO Pablo Vegas said Tuesday at a meeting of the grid operator’s board of directors.
• The growth is coming from a broad range of sectors, including artificial intelligence, data centers, industrial electrification, including the oil and gas sector, a burgeoning hydrogen economy and electric vehicles, Vegas said. In total, ERCOT anticipates about 152 GW of new load by 2030. 
• “We are the best market in the country to react to that kind of growth potential,” Vegas said, touting ERCOT’s status as an “energy island” and resulting lack of federal oversight. “We have the ability in our economy to connect dispatchable resources faster than anyplace else in the country.”

Dive Insight:

Updated regional transmission planning rules mean ERCOT can now consider new types of prospective load, sending 2030 projections dramatically higher in a single year, Vegas explained yesterday.

Previous planning rules prohibited the grid operator from factoring in load that was not financially committed or signed, he said. Legislation passed by the Texas legislature last year now requires the grid operator to consider prospective loads identified by transmission providers across the state.

Texas is seeing “insatiable” desire for electricity, Vegas said. The state will be able to reliably meet the demand, he said, but it will require new planning processes to bring resources online quickly.

EROCT had 1,775 active generation interconnection requests totaling 346 GW as of March 31, according to Vegas’ presentation. Solar represents 155 GW of the queue, followed by 141 GW of battery storage, 35 GW of wind and 15 GW of gas.

One solution to deal with all the requests is ERCOT’s “connect and manage” methodology that allows for faster generator interconnection, said Vegas. A generator, if it can pass certain stability studies in the ERCOT region, can connect to the grid without running studies that solve all the potential congestion issues. Instead, the generator “can be curtailed, but it allows it to get into the system more quickly.”

“We also have distributed energy resources that are evolving,” Vegas said. New legislation “opens the door to getting much improved visibility to distribution resources that are going to help us to evolve our tools and our processes to incorporate them more quickly,” he said.

ERCOT has also been working with the Public Utility Commission of Texas and Texas A&M on a study to evaluate both demand response and energy efficiency opportunities, Vegas said. “We will be initiating workshops this year to discuss some of the best pathways to help scale those potential capabilities in the near future,” he said. 

The state is also seeing new demand for transmission, as load growth is leading to more transmission constraints.

“This is where a lot more of the opportunities lie,” Vegas said. “It still takes three to six years to build transmission facilities and infrastructure. ... We're working very closely with transmission service providers to help identify opportunities to improve and accelerate those methodologies.”

He also mentioned the  Advanced Nuclear Reactor Working Group run by the PUCT. “They have made incredible leaps forward in terms of evaluating the pathways for advancing nuclear in Texas,” he said.

ERCOT is developing the use of “generation hubs” in its regional transmission process, to “show where generation would ideally be optimally placed in order to help solve some of the future load growth needs, and to optimize the transmission investments,” Vegas said.

The grid operator is also considering operating its system at a higher voltage level.

“We're now undertaking a study of how a 765-kV system can support longer-term growth projections more efficiently and with lower cost over time than what our current 345-kV planning norms have been,” Vegas said.

PUC Commissioner Lori Cobos asked about the potential for grid-enhancing technologies like dynamic line ratings to expand infrastructure.

“Dynamic line rating is something we've done here in Texas for years,” Vegas said. “Many of the large transmission service providers and a good majority of the transmission lines in the state of Texas today are dynamically line rated, and we get the benefit of that throughout the year.”

“I think the the tools and the parts are all here for us to be able to respond quickly,” Vegas said. “We have all the resource capabilities to do that in ERCOT.”