The Looming Electricity Crunch Facing The US – Watts Up With That?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Hugh Sharman

Major US grid operators are raising the alarm about the looming capacity crunch.

Power has the story:

“Six major U.S. grid operators have raised a unified alarm about an impending capacity crunch, warning that the pace and scale of explosive demand—including from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification—poses a precarious misalignment with accelerating generator retirements and transmission constraints.

At a March 25 hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy, the nation’s top grid officials testified that the U.S. power system is under mounting strain—and that without urgent structural reforms, the ability to maintain reliable electric service could falter. Their message was unusually direct: demand is accelerating, supply is lagging, and current tools may not be enough to bridge the gap.

Read the full story here.

All of the ten regional grids seem to be facing the same problems of increasing demand and closure of dispatchable capacity. ERCOT, for instance, who run the grid in Texas, forecast that peak demand will increase from 86 GW to 106 GW by 2030.

PJM in the Mid-Atlantic and Mid West anticipate a rise in peak demand of 47% in the next 15 years, and California’s CAISO are looking at an increase of 33% in the next ten years.

The US still relies on gas and coal for half of its power:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_generation_mix/US48/US48

And just as in this country, the US is wholly reliant on gas to fill the gap when demand surges or wind and solar output falls:

Note that in this seven day period alone, wind output ranged from 32 GW to 90 GW. This gives the lie to the claim that the wind is always blowing somewhere. In 2023 the US had wind capacity of 148 GW, running at an average of 33%, so that 32 GW suggests utilisation of about 20%. No doubt there will be weeks when it is much less still.

Solar power meanwhile is little more than an irrelevance.

Taking a closer look at Texas, we find that coal power capacity has dropped by 7.5 GW in the last decade, partly offset by an increase of 4.3 GW of gas. However consumption per capita has grown by 12% in the same period:

Texas needed most of that gas power during February’s cold snap, when wind and solar power dropped away:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64764

The same situation is being played out across the country. Even in sunny California they need gas to fire up to meet demand when the sun goes down both in summer and in winter. (Note the barely measurable contribution from battery storage.)

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/regional/REG-CAL

The US grid has been neglected for many years now, all in the naive belief that reliable coal and gas generation can be replaced with wind and solar. This has been exacerbated by anti fossil fuel regulations, which have prematurely shut down coal plants and discouraged investment in new gas plant.

The looming crunch may be even worse than the grid operators think.

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