Session: 01-02: Decarbonizing Commodity Chemicals and Emissions Analyses

Paper Number: 156289

156289 - Connectin' Texans to National Power Grids: Improving Reliability, Saving Money, and Avoiding Co2 Emissions 

Abstract: 

Reliable development of the power grid in Texas is an increasingly highlighted concern due to winter storms and heat waves that have threatened power sector infrastructure and resulted in recent blackouts and calls for demand side conservation. One of the most devastating of these events was the North American winter storm, later dubbed “Winter Storm Uri” by the Weather Channel, that froze the region in February 2021. Texas was hit especially hard by this storm which led to an extended power outage event that put the majority of residents in darkness for days. The storm-driven grid failure was also responsible for the deaths of hundreds and resulted in over $150 billion in economic losses. While preparing to avoid such outage events in the future, various tools have been proposed to improve grid reliability, including energy efficiency, demand response, and distributed energy resources. However, most of the high-level policy discourse in Texas since the blackouts has focused on just building more power plants capacity. Another option, one that is generally missing from the public discourse, would be to connect the Texas grid to other national grids by building and expanding interregional transmission lines. To assess the merits of this idea, we developed a method to study how the Texas grid would evolve alongside access to various interregional ties, and how the developed grid would respond to the shock of a winter storm event. Our method leverages open-source modeling tools, such as PowerGenome, pyGRETA, and GenX to synthesize unique zonal grid data, construct a consolidated network of model regions, and simulate different developmental pathways of capacity expansion and operational dispatch. We demonstrate our method with an analysis connecting the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid that serves most of Texas, the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC), the grid that serves the western half of the contiguous US, and the Eastern Interconnect, the grid that serves the eastern half of the contiguous US. Alongside the development with interregional connections, our analysis considered a severe winter weather event as a stress condition. We first considered scenarios with normal weather and had the model develop under different connection scenarios. With the results of these scenarios, we shocked each uniquely modeled grid with an extreme weather event forcing the model to operate through a simulated winter storm with high demand and power plant outages. Our initial results indicate that connecting the ERCOT grid to other grids lowers both the costs and emissions of development and operation. Additionally, these connections between ERCOT and other national grids can reduce the amount of total load shed required to get through the extreme winter storm event, thus improving the reliability of the combined grid.

Presenting Author: Drew Kassel University of Texas at Austin

Presenting Author Biography: Drew comes from the north, i.e., Wisconsin. He grew up in Milwaukee and graduated high school in 2017. He moved out to Madison for undergraduate studies and then graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. During his undergrad years, he began his research career as an undergrad assistant in a lab that studied fluid dynamics and the heat transfer properties of two-phase flow. Once graduated, he moved to Austin in the summer of 2021 to begin working toward a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin within the Webber Energy Group.

Drew’s research interests are in big picture energy systems and improving reliability of the power grid. Currently, he is researching grid development scenarios and studying what efforts are needed to prepare for increasingly probable extreme weather events. The methods involved in this research are robust capacity expansion models of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) power grid infrastructure which can be modified to explore specific case studies. These case studies are typically plans that involve grid interconnections, distributed energy resources, and storage options at utility and distributed scales. Ultimately, Drew will study the ripple effects of these options on a case by case basis to determine what combinations of them might work in practice.