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Kristen Kougias did her part to help Texas avoid power outages.
The Fort Worth mother of five has hidden her home’s thermostat in a clear plastic box to prevent her children from turning up the air conditioning, especially during peak times when the state’s largest electric grid operator has urged Texans to keep energy use low .
“Our guys upstairs would turn the thermostat down to 67 if they had a chance,” Kougias said. “In a way, we’re also trying to force our children to save energy.”
Kougias is among an unknown number of Texans who heeded the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ call this summer to conserve electricity to avoid utility outages as power production struggles to keep up with high demand due to intense heat to keep.
With the lights on, she becomes skeptical of the callings.
“I don’t think ERCOT is reliable,” she said, adding that she doesn’t believe Texas politicians have done enough to protect the state from a repeat of the 2021 energy crisis during Winter Storm Uri.
With back-to-back energy conservation requests — eight of them in the last month — some energy and psychology experts warn that Texans like Kougias are heeding the agency’s energy conservation tips, such as how they help or whether requests work.
“If you want people to change their behavior, you have to reward it,” said Tanya Zielinski, a Grapevine-based psychiatrist and former assistant professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center. “If the person can’t say, ‘I changed my thermostat and something happened because of that,’ they’re left with a kind of void.”
To reduce electricity use in homes, ERCOT is asking residents to voluntarily postpone tasks that require electricity, such as doing laundry or using the dishwasher, until after the tense period has passed and to adjust thermostats. If conservation requests and other backup tools are not sufficient, ERCOT will initiate emergency measures to send all remaining generation to the grid and prevent power outages.
ERCOT also pays large industrial and commercial electricity users to reduce their electricity usage when needed.
Pablo Vegas, the CEO and president of ERCOT, acknowledged at a public meeting Thursday that the state grid operator has asked Texans to make significant efforts through multiple calls to conserve energy as the grid approaches very tight operating conditions.
Vegas assured residents that their response to these calls “has been nothing short of great” and that residents’ energy conservation efforts have played a critical role in navigating challenging periods of operations without the need for emergency response.
After Uri, when the state’s electric grid operator couldn’t supply enough power and millions of people lacked access to electricity, ERCOT committed to frequent and timely communication. The agency uses an alert system to provide information about potential periods of high demand and conservation appeals. The aim is to offer customers more transparency and raise awareness, according to the website.
“ERCOT has acted more conservatively in recent years after[winter storm] Uri,” said Joshua Rhodes, a researcher specializing in energy at the University of Texas at Austin, pointing to the operator’s news and forecasts on energy demand.
Rhodes said the conservation warnings appeared to be working because the lights were left on, but the agency ran the risk of being “the boy who cried wolf” and issued multiple warnings.
Marissa Riolo is a Texan who has seen enough and said this week she will no longer follow ERCOT’s warnings.
“I am absolutely outraged by the amount of requests that have been made this summer,” said Riolo, a Montgomery resident.
What makes things even more difficult for Riolo is that there are local power outages. Her family, who lives about 60 miles northeast of Houston, endured outages after conserving energy for up to 48 hours. Due to power outages, she has had to empty her refrigerator of groceries and meat twice in the last three months.
Riolo said she is frustrated by what she described as a lack of transparency about the status of the power grid. ERCOT did not have to announce any outages this summer.
“I have no confidence whatsoever in ERCOT’s ability to operate our electric grid effectively, and I don’t believe they have done anything to prove me wrong,” she said.
ERCOT does not track usage data by customer class or individual meter, said Ellie Breed, spokeswoman for the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates electricity in the state. But in previous calls for energy conservation, ERCOT said there had been a nationwide decline of about 500 megawatts in demand on the grid – which can power about 100,000 homes during peak demand.
Larry Jones, manager of corporate communications for utility American Electric Power Texas, said residents need to “be alert to and responsive to the state’s grid operators’ energy conservation demands” because it has helped the system avoid a worst-case scenario – people without electricity, temperatures in the three-digit range.
AEP Texas and major utilities such as Oncor Electric Delivery and CenterPoint Energy said they could not say how much energy use will fall during the conservation measures or who is leading the decline: residential or commercial users.
Zielinski said if ERCOT wants to motivate Texans to save during critical times of high demand, they need to provide information about the impact people have when they save.
“[ERCOT] I would like to present a clear result. You could basically say, ‘Were you one of the people who turned your thermostat up a degree higher than usual today?’ Here’s what that did,” Zielinski said.
Emily Foxhall contributed to this story.
Disclosure: CenterPoint Energy, Oncor, University of Texas at Austin and UT Southwestern Medical Center have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. A full list of them can be found here.
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