Jon Wellinghoff can't stop stirring the pot. Not that that's a bad thing for the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; it's just something new for the person in that job.
Last week he made waves by calling the concept of baseload power perhaps an anachronism. This week he suggested that the Texas-only power system, which is outside of FERC's jurisdiction, might do well to integrate more with the rest of the country. At least one blogger found the suggestion intriguing, but said Wellinghoff might want to be a little wilier in his approach.
Michael Giberson, who teaches at Texas Tech and used to be with Potomac Economics, called FERC the spider and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas the fly. Wellinghoff, "the chief spider," invited ERCOT "to step into the federal parlor." He noted that "[t]he fable of the spider and the fly turned out badly in the end, from the fly's point of view."
In a conference call that was part of the American Wind Energy Association's conference in Chicago, Wellinghoff said Texas, which already has a great deal of wind power, "could integrate even more wind into the system" if it were more strongly interconnected with the Midwest. Our correspondent Housley Carr reported that the chairman acknowledged the political reasons that Texans wanted to keep their power system separate from the rest of the grid, but he said "we simply cannot incrementally develop these renewables without building up the entire grid into a strong grid system."
Giberson wrote that Ercot may continue to be useful as a laboratory from which the other interconnections can learn, but he suggested expanding existing lines from the Southwest Power Pool into wind-rich central-west Texas and letting wind farms pick their market. Barry Smitherman, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, told the International Business Times that some of that action is already going on, and there was no need at all for FERC to encroach on Texas.
In Giberson's view, FERC could just encourage SPP to build lines a little deeper into Texas, "and the PUC of Texas should accommodate the effort." Overall, he said, "there is real value from increasing the ability to trade power between systems, so some sort of deal should be pursued."
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