Mexico provides electricity to ice storm-hit Texas


Mexico will provide electricity to Texas to help the state weather an ice storm that has forced rolling blackouts.

Mexico's Federal Electricity Commission says it has agreed to transmit 280 megawatts of electricity to Texas between Wednesday and Thursday night.

A commission statement says the electricity will be transmitted at interconnection points in Nuevo Laredo - across the border from Laredo, Texas - and Piedras Negras, which sits opposite of Eagle Pass, Texas.

ERCOT finally moved to this power pool formation about a decade ago. But there’s a limit to this, because Texas chose decades ago to limit its transmission interconnections with other states, so as to avoid the “interstate commerce” that would trigger Federal jurisdiction. It’s the Rick Perry attitude towards whether they’re part of the Union or not.

Texas stands alone, and the interconnections it has with other states are both limited and of a different type (Direct Current), which aren’t free flowing; they’re highly controlled.

What that means is that when something happens in Texas, it doesn’t affect surrounding systems like Southwest Power Pool, and vice versa. But the price they pay is that when they need help, they don’t necessarily get it. And when there’s a severe emergency, as happened this week, their whole system becomes vulnerable, just to please an ideological insistence to stand alone.

If Texas had been more interconnected with the US, the way the entire Eastern Interconnection (MISO, SPP, PJM, NY, NE, etc) are interconnected, it’s entirely possible that the combined system would have automatically fixed the problems before the lights in Texas went out. It’s just physics.

When an operating plant trips off, standby operating reserves automatically kick in, and if those trip too, other plants should kick in. Further, in a fraction of a second, the voltage frequency drops across the transmission grid, and [local] voltage support may also suffer. When that happens, the ISO’s system dispatch automatically sends signals to many other generators to ramp up, to bring supply back in balance with demand and raise voltage levels to reliable levels.

Again, we don’t know the exact sequence of the Texas failure. But it’s likely that if Texas had been more strongly interconnected with the US, the entire Eastern Interconnection would have instantly responded to the frequency/voltage dips and immediately brought more generators on line in surrounding states. So even if other plants in Texas tripped off, as they apparently did, extra power from plants in Missouri and Illinois and Ohio would have kept the lights on in Texas.

That would have avoided rolling blackouts in Texas’ cities. It would have kept the electric compressor/pumps running in northern Texas that send natural gas to Northern New Mexico, which lost gas supplies for heating in the middle of winter.

In unity, there is strength, safety, reliability. We know this. We’ve had 100 years of electricity system developments to prove it, over and over.