Serving the High Plains

Hoping Tres Amigas will revive

I was fortunate to watch Texas’ power supply difficulties from afar.

Tucumcari was far enough. I didn’t have to go to Cancun.

In Tucumcari, the closest we got to Texas’ Texas-size electricity issues was one 45-minute “controlled outage,” on Feb. 16 after a weekend of deep-freeze temperatures and snow that we shared with most of the country.

The power emergency that led Tucumcari into the “rolling blackout” circuit ended 15 minutes into the next 45-minute outage, which involved Santa Rosa. That one ended early as the emergency status that brought on both outages became less severe right then.

Eastern New Mexico and much of the Texas Panhandle are part of the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), which covers a region that stretches from the Dakotas to Oklahoma, dipping into eastern New Mexico.

The rest of Texas gets electricity through the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which is confined to Texas south of the Panhandle, a product of Texans’ aversion to federal control that could result if its electrons crossed state lines.

SPP got clobbered by February’s sudden polar chill, but ERCOT was devastated. It lost too much generating capacity too quickly to make adequate adjustments. As a result, millions lost power and heat as outages became deadly.

In a former life, I worked for Southern California Edison, a huge electric utility. Edison and my job barely survived the utter disaster of the California Electricity Crisis of 2000-2001, which resulted from gross design flaws in the state’s power supply deregulation plan.

I saw power prices climb to the level that produced $10,000 residential bills for some Texans over five days and stay there for nearly a year for millions of customers in California, due to a bad law and ruthless greed from power plant owners like Houston’s happily now-defunct Enron.

After California utilities had drained their resources, the state of California took on the hemorrhaging of cash to avoid raising electric bills, draining its general fund to the tune of $45 billion to pay for 10 years of overcharges, which I think began the state’s financial straits that continue today.

When I moved to New Mexico in 2008, I got a small thrill about living close to the proposed site near Clovis of Tres Amigas, the “power super station” that would unite the nation’s major power grids, including ERCOT, into a single power trading complex.

Then ERCOT dropped out, likely due to the federal phobia, leaving Tres Amigas where it is now, alive only as a vision. Tres Amigas would have made use of new superconductor technology to gather vast amounts of power in a very small space, and release it as ordered from one grid to the next.

Tres Amigas would also employ direct-current lines, which can carry more power in a few thin wires than thick alternating current lines on 200-foot towers, to increase the efficiency of large-scale power trades between grids.

I am hopeful Tres Amigas can be revived to create a national grid that could have rescued the reliability of ERCOT and SPP in February while reducing overall electricity costs through nationwide trading.

Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]

 
 
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