Imagine being part of a grid that doesn’t completely collapse during a crisp breeze!
That could be in Texas’ future, since the federal government is giving us a bunch of money to force us to grow the fuck up and join the rest of the country.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced $360 million in federal funding to connect Texas’ grid to those in the Southeast, the Houston Chronicle reported.
But before you get too excited, let us pour a little cold water on this news.
If the project is completed, it doesn’t mean that Texas would be fully integrated with the rest of the national grid, Texas energy consultant Doug Lewin told The Barbed Wire in an email.
The project would result in “limited connections” that mostly export “Texas power to the east, with the ability to reverse flow and import power in an emergency like Winter Storm Uri,” said Lewin, who writes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter and hosts the Energy Capital Podcast.
The line would enable 3,000 megawatts of electricity to be transmitted to and from the Texas grid, sufficient to power 750,000 homes. Which is a lot, but it’s obviously not enough to power the whole state.
Still, Lewin said the project is important. He added that “3,000 megawatts is a lot of power and any interconnection, even if limited, is positive. We only have 1,200 megawatts of interconnection currently.”
The project, known as the Southern Spirit line, would cover 320 miles across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. It would transmit nuclear power from Mississippi to Dallas (when needed) and allow Texas to send excess wind and solar power eastward. It’s also really expensive, with an estimated price tag of $2.6 billion.
The project has hit numerous hurdles over the years, but it’s clear the feds want this to happen.
And we need it.
In case you were living under a rock in 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out the Texas power grid for days, leading to the deaths of 246 people. And, as anyone living in Texas will tell you, our power infrastructure regularly gets stressed during any kind of severe weather, leading to consistent (and often reasonable) requests from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to conserve power.
The new line would be managed by the same council, and it would allow our grid to keep our precious exemption from federal regulation (which is the whole reason Texas wants its own grid in the first place). But it would also give us some protection against blackouts and, you know, people freezing to death in their homes.
The project has been in the works for more than a decade, but it’s been held up by the usual stuff, like a complex permitting process and opposition from landowners and lawmakers in Louisiana and Mississippi. Good news, though! It recently got approval from the Louisiana Public Service Commission.
So, fingers crossed (if you can still feel them)!
