Are we pushing our power supply to the limit?

(8/13/07 - KTRK/HOUSTON) (KTRK) -- On Monday, Texas inched close to an all time record for power use. The high temperatures forced air conditioners to strain all day to keep us cool

Hot? Yeah. Just leaving your office for a minute Monday afternoon was a near unbearable experience.

"It's like walking into hell with gasoline clothes on," is how downtown worker Rachel Harrison put it.

In other words, it was a whole lot nicer inside, thanks to air-conditioning. But all those air-conditioners suck an awful lot of power off the Texas electric grid. And that made Monday a nervous experience for some.

Texas only has so many power plants. They can't just make more and more and more if we need it. When all the power plants in the state are running, Texas has 71,000 megawatts available. On Monday at our peak, Texans were using more than 62,000 of them. It's not a record, but a little nerve-wracking.

"Days like today, it's very important consumers know how tight the supply and demand balance is," said David Roylance with Reliant Energy.

Roylance, on days like Monday, asks big power users -- office buildings and industrial plants -- to cut back. The easiest thing they do is to make the office a little warmer, which may not be all that bad.

"It's pretty cold in there," said Harrison. "I could stand a little warmer in there."

"A few degrees difference can mean a drop of 10-15 percent of your energy usage," said Roylance. "The incentive is one, the social aspect to keep the integrity of the grid, but two, if they reduce usage at peak times, they will spend less."

It's a win-win that worked Monday. ERCOT tells us they count on big users to scale back voluntarily to keep usage down. It is a program that by the end of the year may be rolled out to homeowners.
(Copyright © 2007, KTRK-TV)

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