If you're reading this and the cost prohibitive part of this story doesn't make sense you have to understand how far forward the Texas grid is when it comes to renewables.

There have been many occasions where the cost of power in Texas has gone negative. (see: https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/understanding-negative-pr... )

For this to happen there are a lot of factors that come into play but it indicates a downward price pressure on generation that is not going to go away. Storage and transmission are going to be the largest costs for the system going forward. These "ride through" upgrades make sense in the near term (generation side) but in the long term become just another cost that in theory could be put on the storage portion of the system (not in place yet).

Texas cutting itself off from the national grid, is now at the bleeding edge of renewables. 20 Years ago, that sentence would have gotten you laughed out of the state.

Some interesting facts:

* ERCOT (Texas) has more renewables generation than every other ISO, including CAISO (California)

* ERCOT is setting new renewables records almost every month, as new renewables sites come online.

Source: https://www.gridstatus.io/home

When there is a voltage or frequency disturbance on the grid, caused by lightning strikes or equipment failures, ERCOT expects power generators to “ride through” the disturbances and continue producing power. But inverter-based resources such as wind, solar and batteries — especially the oldest ones — may sometimes not be able to ride through the disturbance and could “trip” > offline and disconnect from the grid. This could lead to a domino effect of other generators tripping offline, which could in a worst-case scenario result in the “rapid collapse of part of or all the ERCOT system,” according to ERCOT. ERCOT has experienced a growing number of these inverter-based resource failures, particularly in West Texas. In 2021 and again in 2022, more than 1,000 megawatts of solar resources tripped offline near Odessa, prompting the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), an international regulatory authority, to recommend ERCOT rectify the risk.

Interesting read: Inverters don’t have spinning mass like turbines that can deal with fluctuations in the grid (simplified) (as we learned from Grady’s Practical Engineering) and they follow the grid, but can’t build a grid. But we also learned from him that modern inverters can actually build a grid and behave like a “mechanical generator”.

So as I understand it, a lot of existing renewable suppliers have to do some retrofitting, which is probably expensive, so now we are here.

<Sigh>

Australia went through this very same propaganda when a once in 100 year lightning storm caused a big grid interconnect failure, and a large part of an entire state was without power for weeks [1]

The Politicians at the time spun it as being caused by evil renewables, and the damage was done. A huge percentage of the population still believes that renewables cause power outages, cause prices to go up, and are the work of the devil.

Talk about putting a spin on something to ensure the legacy providers keeps making a profit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

Grain of salt but there is some bad precedent here with the state's messaging on these matters [1] This is from 2021, which if not catastropic, was pretty bad. But it's ok, because Texas residents will be paying off the losses there for the next 25 years [2]!

1. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/texas-wind-turbines-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis#Utilit...