A Preliminary Study on the Role of Energy Storage and Load Rationing in Mitigating the Impact of the 2021 Texas Power Outage

In February 2021, an unprecedented winter storm swept across the U.S., severely affecting the Texas power grid, leading to more than 4.5 million customers' electricity service interruption. This paper assesses the load shedding experienced by customers under realistic scenarios in the actual power grid. It also conducts a preliminary study on using energy storage and load rationing to mitigate rotating blackout's adverse impact on the grid. It is estimated that utility-scale battery storage systems with a total installed capacity of 920 GWh would be required to fully offset the load shedding during the Texas power outage if energy storage were the only technical option. Our simulation result suggests that implementing 20 percent load rationing on the system could potentially reduce this estimated energy storage capacity by 85 percent. This estimate is obtained using the predicted capacity and demand profile from February 15 to February 18, 2021. Recognizing the fact that it would be very challenging to practically deploy energy storage of this size, approaches to provide more granular demand reduction are studied as a means of leveraging the energy storage to maximize the survivability of consumers. Preliminary case study suggests the potential of combining load rationing and proper sizing of energy storage would potentially provide much reliability improvement for the grid under such extreme weather conditions.