Texas heat brings power plants out of mothballs

• 12 years ago (2011-08-17)
• David Flin

North America 998

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NRG and Garland Power and Light have announced that they will bring four mothballed power plants back online to meet summer power demand in Texas. This was at the request of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

NRG has said that it will start the two natural gas-fired units with a combined generating capacity of 292 MW at the SR Bertron plant near Houston. These were mothballed in 2010. Garland Power and Light has said that it will bring two natural gas-fired units with a combined capacity of 122 MW online next week.

A combination of record high temperatures and a large number of plants going offline for unplanned maintenance in recent weeks have pushed the state’s main electric grid into crisis several times this summer. Texas set a power use record on August 2, and on August 4, it came close to rolling blackouts for what would have been just the fourth time in 21 years.

The drought in Texas has not yet forced power plants to cut back operations, but it may become an issue. Several plants have had problems when the temperature of water in cooling reservoirs didn’t drop enough overnight, leading to less efficient operation. A spokesman for ERCOT said: “Without rainfall in the near future, we anticipate increased outage rates because of power plant cooling water issues.”