Texas House OKs bill to boost power grid protection, strengthen ERCOT's emergency authority
A proposal to grant regulators increased oversight of electric generation and transmission, along with equipping the state power grid's manager with tools to better forecast energy needs, passed the House on Tuesday. The legislation is now heading back to the Senate to review the lower chamber's changes to the bill.
Senate Bill 6 is the Legislature's latest effort to reduce the risk of widespread outages during peak demand times by allowing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state power grid, to cut power to large-scale consumers during an emergency. That should encourage power-hungry operations like data centers to develop their own backup systems, said Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, who sponsored the bill in the House.
"You certainly don't want large-load customers that sometimes are data-centered for military operations, or whatever, to just be without power when there's an emergency," King said during the floor debate.
According to the bill analysis, SB 6 focuses on four main objectives:
Ensuring that transmission costs are properly allocated.
Establishing measures to protect grid reliability.
Promoting transparency and credibility in load forecasting.
Protecting residential customers from outages by requiring large loads to share the load-shed obligation during shortages.
More: Renewables bailed out Texas' grid earlier this month. Now the GOP wants to restrict them
In March, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told a congressional committee that Texas set an all-time peak demand record of 85,508 gigawatts in the summer of 2023 — a record he expects the state will break sooner than later because, in part, large-scale consumers are bringing their operations to the Lone Star State.
"Texas has become a magnet for industries that require increasing amounts of electricity, from semiconductor plants to data centers, broad industrial growth and large-scale industrial electrification in the Permian Basin," Vegas told the House subcommittee on energy.
Under the bill, ERCOT would be able to expedite connecting large consumers to the grid, provided they install on-site backup power sources.
The House and Senate versions of SB 6 are different, so unless the Senate agrees with the House's changes, a conference committee will have to reconcile the two versions into a final bill.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas House OKs power grid-protection bill, boosts ERCOT's authority
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