ORALS

In recent years, grid operators in Texas, California and the Midwest “shed load,” that is, forced many of their customers to a blacked-out (no electricity available) condition. These blackouts occurred when the grid’s power plants cannot supply enough electricity to match the demand on the grid. This paper describes the root cause of many of these blackouts, including the incentive system of power plant payments, the role of renewables in increasing the fragility of the grid, and the rules for dispatch on the grid.[1] The Regional Transmission Organization (RTO) grids in New England and Texas are the main focus of the paper. These areas are also called the “Deregulated” areas, though that is a misnomer, since they are highly regulated, but not in the manner that most utilities were regulated before 1990. For the analysis paper, data was collected from the grid operator websites [2], from trade publication analysis, and from academic analysis [3]. The conclusion is that rules and incentives in RTO areas actively discourage investments in reliability. The RTO areas encourage the “fatal trifecta” of over-reliance on intermittent renewables, just-in-time delivery of natural gas, and hoped-for imports from neighboring grids. These changes make a grid more fragile, and are root cause of most of the recent blackouts

References:
[1] Angwin, Meredith, Shorting the Grid, The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid, Carnot Communications, 2020

[2] Chadalavada, Vamsi, “Cold Weather Operations, ISO-NE, December 2017- January 8, 2018,” Issued January 16, 2018. https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2018/01/20180112_cold_weather_ops_npc.pdf

[3] Kavulla, Travis, “There is No Free Market for Electricity, Can There Ever Be?” https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/no-free-market-electricity-can-ever/
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume I, Number 2 (Summer 2017): 126–50.