On the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilho San Antonio is a fast growing, fast moving city with something new happening every day.

That's why each week we go on the record with Randy Beamer and the newsmakers who are driving this change.

Then we gather at the Reporters Roundtable to talk about the latest news stories with the journalist behind those stories.

Joining us now as we go on the Record with Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

I'm Randy Beamer.

And this is one of those weeks that we have set records for Heat, but we may have forgotten about some other issues as well.

We're going to get into power usage and water and where we are in the drought.

Joining us to talk about that is Karen Gus of the San Antonio Water System.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

Again, we're talking about heat a lot.

We're talking about power, especially this week.

And whether it's going to outstrip the demand is going to outstrip supply.

But another huge issue that may have been overshadowed by this is water and where we are in the drought and how you're dealing with that because you're looking at doing some new things right now.

Tell us about that.

Well, the first thing to note is that this drought we're in is extraordinary.

People know that because of the things you just said, it is so hot and it has been a rough summer for everyone.

But the aquifer is low, much lower than normal for summer.

It has only been this low a few times.

So size is taking this drought very seriously when it comes to water, so is the whole region.

And a message we need everybody to hear is the rules we ask you to follow.

They really matter.

They help the water system.

They help that power grid and they help the whole region that once a week watering is critical right now and most people are doing that.

But there are chronic people out there.

And you see them every day.

You drive past a shopping center or a median or commercial.

Generally, this kind of thing.

And there are, you know, spigots that are broken in the water.

How big a problem is it?

Some so those big users.

Well, I want to be clear that 90% of size customers, whether they're commercial irrigation sites or single family residential, are actually doing what we ask them to do.

So if you're one of those thank you.

We really appreciate you.

But 10% not can really drive up the water.

You mentioned records For the past couple of weeks, size has had to produce over 300 million gallons a day.

That's very high for us.

That's a record we don't like.

And it's a lot of water.

It's it's more than we're used to producing even in a hot, dry summer.

And how much of that is those chronic abusers of well, irrigation water accounts for in that in that 300 million gallons, that's probably 70 million gallons a day of that is from irrigation usage.

We can see it drop up to 50 million gallons on Saturday and Sunday when people don't use their air.

And so we're talking irrigation.

People might think farmers, you're talking about sprinkler systems, I should probably call them sprinkler systems because that's how most people think of them.

So what we are doing is really urgently messaging to everyone out there that you have a day and a time, one day a week, 7 to 11, 7 to 11 to get your irrigation sprinkler work done, and that's when you should do it.

It's enough to retain the health of your plants and if you are not, please know that we have 30 people out in the middle of the night out there patrolling.

There were 600 citations processed last week and we'd much rather have people set that controller to the right setting and get a citation.

What is a citation?

Meaning you have people with multiple citations and they don't want to say they don't seem to care, but it doesn't seem to change behavior.

Well, it's a city of San Antonio, like a traffic ticket, and you're going to have to deal with the city of San Antonio Municipal Court to clear it.

So please know that that's a hassle you probably don't want.

Now, most people get one and they're done.

Especially residential customers, people, the homes.

Now we are seeing, unfortunately, a very small number of commercial irrigation properties that have gotten multiple citations.

They don't seem to be stopping running it too much, is it not that much money?

And it's a very small.

Yeah.

So long term, we need to change our enforcement procedures to make sure there's a meaningful consequence that if you pay thousands of dollars for your water bill at a big property, it probably needs to be a little thicker fee to reflect that to get your attention.

How are you going to do that?

And also get your attention by cutting your water off?

So right now, that kind of water off.

Yeah.

So right now, one of the tools we still have that we've never used before is the ability to disconnect.

Now we're really looking at commercial properties that are irrigation only accounts.

So to be clear, that meter is serving just probably grass, no people.

And so if we're seeing chronic noncompliance at that specific account, we are going to warn them and say, please stop, because if you don't, we're going to turn it off and then you can get it back on when we talk.

And there's a procedure for getting it, not turning off the water in their buildings.

It's turning off the water to their plants and and so we're not putting people at risk in this heat, but we are saying we are serious about this.

So if you're one of those sites that's commercial and you've gotten a lot of of violation notices from us, you're going to get a new one that says, really understand we're serious about this.

When is that going to happen?

How often or how many could that happen to and what's the timeline?

So we're any moment now, we're getting ready to send out those notices to those properties.

I'm happy to say it's a small list.

Now, some of them are using shocking amounts of water, and so it will help when they stop and get on a once a week schedule.

You can imagine if you have a large property and you're watering five days a week instead of one, it is a lot more water than really you should be using during drought.

Sometimes, you know, you see it in the paper, in the media.

Which of these companies are bigger?

And I don't want to say it's a shaming, but it's a public pointing out that these businesses need to change.

Is that going to be part of it?

Well, I prefer not to use the public shaming.

I prefer to directly communicate with the person who's the responsible party and try to convince them to stop.

And if you have a large property and you're watering everything once good, that's okay.

I'm not trying to say you're doing something wrong by watering everything one time, but what we are asking is watering at one time is sufficient for the health of your landscape long term.

Is it looking?

It's best?

Of course not.

Are these schedules be most of these or is it just not maintaining and allowing broken spigots and things like that to just go in?

In some cases?

I think it is just not being attentive to getting out there and changing that irrigation controller to the one day a week that we have folks who maybe aren't hearing how urgent this is during this drought.

How urgent is it in terms of the ways that it's showing itself in the in the lakes that are as low as they've ever been and the springs that are as low as they've ever been?

And what we used to hear about endangered species and things like that, where are we?

So we're in the Edwards Aquifer Authority has declared stage four.

That is a very serious level of drought and we have zero inflows into some lakes.

We have some springs across Texas that are no longer flowing, and that's a problem for the larger ecosystem.

It's a problem for folks in our region around San Antonio.

We have wells that are dropping rapidly.

And so what we do during these times, the San Antonio contributes by reining it in on the discretionary water use.

And so if we all water just one time a week that maintains the health and we get through it until it rains.

But another thing that may have lulled people into thinking we don't have a problem is the Vista Ridge Water project that's bringing in another major source of water besides the aquifer.

Do you think that's convinced some people I don't need or really care anymore?

You know, I got to say, this bridge has performed beautifully in the last two summers when we have really needed that water.

But that amount of water is being used up by excessive irrigation.

So people might have heard, oh, it's so much water from Vista Ridge, we're good.

Well, we are.

If everybody moderates their use during drought.

So it is amazing how we can burn through that very large water supply project from 10% of people using more discretionary water than they should.

Are you also encouraging people you said you have 30 people out looking for this kind of violation.

But I want to say to Narcan, but to report to you, hey, this business, this whatever a person is overusing water and it's a problem.

So what we do with those situations is we send out a warning.

So a citation is only issued if a source trained person sees it.

And there's I think I've mentioned there have been 7000 of those here to date.

That's a lot.

There have also been thousands of warnings.

And if you report a property that's watering on the wrong day or water flowing down the street, you may help them not get a citation because we'll use that anonymous information.

We don't want to know who you are.

We just want to know who we need to give them a nudge to say, Hey, please fix it.

And if we get multiple complaints, we will make sure they're on our patrol route and I don't have time to get into it.

But you also are encouraging zero escaping.

That's a word you probably don't want to use, but just cutting back on water in your design of your landscape.

Yeah, I've done that in my front yard and let my grass die.

And it's it's not bad.

It's a lot less mowing.

And, you know, if I can take water out or take grass out, I'll do that.

And you're encouraging that as well.

I'm glad you brought it up.

We have go to garden stylist sitcom.

We have all kinds of programs to help you maybe have less grass, have plants that are super hardy that are going to hold up to this heat.

So yeah, help you moneywise do that can help you have a lower water bill and you know so yes we're we have a lot of programs to help you revise that landscape over time.

Have it still be beautiful and resilient little carrot as well as Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Well, thanks very much and good luck with it.

Karen in San Antonio Water System.

I really appreciate you coming in.

I hope next time you come in, we have some better news.

I hope so.

Thanks.

After we just talked about water and conservation of water in this heat, we need to talk about power and how important that is right now, especially with ERCOT telling us that demand may be exceeding supply right now with all the high temperatures across the state.

Joining us to talk about that is Doug Lewin, who is an energy expert and author of the Texas Energy and Power newsletter and a consultant.

Thank you very much for joining us.

First of all, these days that ERCOT, when it issues these warnings or alerts and recommends that people cut back between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., where are we right now in power production compared to power supply?

And which times are the worst?

Yeah, so it's a great question and I actually think that ERCOT needs to evolve its messaging on this changed messaging on this.

There was one particular night, it was actually Sunday, August 20th, where they called for conservation between seven and ten.

And I was really encouraged by that because those are really the hours where we really have the most to rest at this point.

And that is a function of solar really coming on strong.

Right.

So if you look back just a few years, we would really the system would be under stress and the conservation calls would really be focused on about four or five in the evening.

Solar is really alleviating a lot of the strain at that time.

But as the sun's going down, that's when we're having some problems.

Luckily, demand is down a little bit to rise.

Not quite as hot.

You know, air conditioning isn't working quite as hard, but those are the really the key hours, about 7 to 9.

And so far, we've seen the mix of thermal generation that that's gas, coal, nuclear plants, wind and battery storage be able to meet those needs.

There have been a couple of really close calls, but when I say really close calls, they didn't even get into emergency conditions, much less rolling outages.

I've heard some people say, oh, there were rolling outages.

Where I live, there have not been rolling outages this summer.

We haven't even been into emergency conditions, if any any viewers out there have had outages.

That's because of issues on the on the local distribution.

And some people are maybe downplaying or diminishing the impact, the positive impact of solar and wind, especially after the cold snap that we had where people blamed, oh, we didn't have enough of that.

And we need more gas and oil production.

But that's not the case.

And we're having growing wind and solar.

How how much of Texas power grid right now is supplied by renewables?

Yeah.

So on average over the year we're at a little bit more than 30% now of energy generation is from wind and solar, which is really magnify it and and really beyond what anybody could have reasonably expected as recently as like seven or eight years ago.

Interestingly, during June, there were very high levels of thermal plant outages.

Again, that's gas, coal and nuclear.

There was one day one of the nuclear units tripped offline, several coal plants went offline.

ERCOT defines the typical level of outages at about 5000 megawatts.

We were we were routinely in the 8 to 10000 megawatts of 60 to 100% higher than what ERCOT expects on those thermal outages.

But wind and solar were so strong during June that that we really I think we had maybe one conservation call during the entire month of June.

And you remember how incredibly hot it was that production carried into July as well.

We definitely seen lower levels of wind in August.

That is very unusual for this type of time of year.

And that's really when hopefully those thermal plants, we're taking their maintenance back then earlier and even in June and are now able to run in August.

So it's a system.

All these things work together.

Renewables play a huge role, both contributing to reliability and very importantly, to helping to lower our cost thermal plants you're talking about.

What does that mean, gas, coal and nuclear?

Those are geothermal.

It could also be thermal.

We don't have any of that yet.

So it means gas, coal and nuclear.

And what about the growth and the potential of wind that was out in west Texas recently?

I saw literally train loads of those huge turbines.

You see them all over the landscapes, especially out in rural Texas.

What's the potential of that?

And there's a problem with the grid in Texas getting some of that wind and solar from out in the middle of nowhere to the rest of Texas.

Well, that's exactly right.

So we definitely are going to need more transmission to connect those low cost electrons that are coming from wind power.

We right now have just about 40,000 megawatts of wind in Texas, a little less within within ERCOT, but about 38,000 megawatts.

That's an amazing number.

It makes us by far the largest wind producer in the United States.

And if we were a country, we'd be something like fifth or sixth in the world and installed wind.

It's really a fantastic story.

Winds growth has slowed down of late.

We're adding two or 3000 megawatts per year.

What we're seeing rapid growth in solar and in storage.

And that's wonderful because it's actually complementary.

Typically, we see when wind reaches its lowest point is when solar is at its highest point.

Typically as the sun is going down, the wind is coming up, and then you have battery storage to kind of fill in those gaps in between.

So it's really exciting what's going on in Texas.

We will need some more transmission to connect.

Where are we on battery power?

Because years ago or several years ago, that was the knock on wind and solar that there was no place or at least solar, no place to store it.

Southwest Research here has been working on storage.

How far advanced is that and when can we expect that to really ramp up the solar production?

And so you don't have to have a certain times of day.

Yeah.

So we're we're very close to and matter of fact, we're already storage is already contributing in a major way.

It's obviously on a percentage basis, it's something like a percent and a half or 2%, but we're at 3300 megawatt.

So to put that in perspective, that's roughly equal to the peak load of the entire Austin Energy Service territory.

So we're about in Austin where the battery storage on the grid right now.

ERCOT expects that to double by next summer and double again by the summer of 2025.

So we would be up to 14,000.

The whole San Antonio area is about seven.

So by 2025 we'll have more than a San Antonio in Austin worth of storage.

That's a really, really big deal and really helps to fill in those gaps when the wind is blowing as hard and as the sun goes down.

What about usage from Bitcoin and producers from that?

I know last year, a couple of years ago when that was big, maybe bigger, they were talking about how that can use the power of that would supply all of Houston.

Is that still as big as it was?

And is there a way to maybe throttle that or cut that back?

But aside from the value of it going down, yeah, Bitcoin is obviously very controversial.

I guess people are very animated and emotional about it.

What I what I'll say about Bitcoin is I think about it not from like, you know, is it needed.

I'm not smart enough to understand what what Bitcoin actually is.

But but what I do understand is how it kind of works on the grid.

Right now we're at about 2000 megawatts of of bitcoin on the grid.

You would you mentioned that size of Houston like 20,000.

That's what's in the study.

We don't know whether any of that will get built.

Here's what I think is really important about that, though.

What we are going to see is more and more large flexible loans.

So you can think of electric vehicles and think particularly like of electric busses, Right.

So as a metro in Houston or in San Antonio, Cap Metro in Austin, they've got hundreds of busses each with really, really large batteries in it, right.

Large enough to to to power a bus and they're going to charge up.

They can charge up when we have a lot of wind and solar and prices are really low and they can throttle back or down to zero when we don't have as much.

That also works for green hydrogen.

It works for carbon capture.

You just had a segment on water and our water shortages.

It works for desalination to a big power hungry right users desalination plant and those are variable loads that can be reduced when there's not as much power.

So that's going to be a really big deal on the grid.

But just the last thing I'd say about that is the large flexible loads are really interesting and ERCOT spends a lot of time on it.

We're going to have more and more small, flexible loads too.

So consumers, residential consumers, homeowners, renters, small business owners can participate in demand response programs and actually get paid to use less.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

Wish we had more time as parent guys.

I told her, I hope you can come back when there's some better news and lower temperatures and people are actually conserving a little bit more, as they should.

Thank you very much, Doug Lewin, who was the author of the Texas Energy Power, Energy and Power newsletter.

Thanks.

Okay, Spurs fans, this is for you.

We are heading into a new season with number one pick, Victor Wemba Inyama.

There is talk of building a new stadium downtown and the man who knows everything about how that talks started, whether or not they want us to know it or not, it was everything.

But the details are correct.

Jefferson Metro Ed and you know, some details that the city maybe didn't want because you had a an open records request.

Yeah.

So tell me about when this actually started before Victor Wanyama.

Oh, yeah.

Well, before, according to a series of text messages and emails between city officials and kind of Spurs executives, it looks like the city approached the Spurs about downtown arena potentially as early as January, but it could even go back into 2022.

I found there was a meeting between Spurs CEO R.C.

Buford, the team's general counsel, Bobby Perez, city manager Eric Walsh, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg at what was then the AT&T Center to talk about facility infrastructure.

And it's worth noting that the first Bank center is actually county owned.

So I'm not sure what what infrastructure they were talking about because it wasn't the city owned the county.

Basically, the story is same.

The idea of the Spurs staying in town with building the AT&T center after the city wasn't able to come up with the funding.

Why would it be the city wanting to do this instead of the Spurs?

And where are they financially?

Well, for the cities from from the city's perspective, downtown is struggling to recover from the pandemic.

There's just not a lot of life downtown.

The convention and large meetings business that brings thousands of people to downtown.

It's rebounding, but but slowly.

But now Graham Weston, big investor, is is building some things downtown.

Yeah very confident that's right is also involved in one of the stadium issues downtown he is and yeah exactly so yeah so western urban they built the you know the the most recent skyscraper the frost tower you know first one since the 1980s and they're involved in several residential office and retail projects, mostly on the west end of downtown.

And yeah, the CEO of Western Urban Randy Smith and Graham Weston are both investors in the San Antonio missions and their desire is to have a downtown baseball stadium.

This is a longstanding dream that the mission's previous owner had wanted to move to a downtown brand, you know, shiny new downtown baseball stadium.

They they just never had the juice to do it.

They have to upgrade if they want to stay, right?

Yeah.

So yeah.

And the the the background to the story is that Major League Baseball took over the minor leagues in 2022 and they're imposing some pretty rigorous stadium standards on all owners of minor league teams.

And if you look at you know, if you've been to Nelson W Wolfe Municipal Stadium on the far West Side recently.

Wow.

I mean it's not you know, it's a lot of work to bring it up to MLB standards.

I mean, you know, the new, bigger, bigger clubhouses you need training facilities for players, better lighting.

So there has been a push for that even before the push for a Spurs stadium.

How likely do you think either one of those is to happen now after I thing?

I mean, yeah, So judging from, you know, all of the text messages and emails, I've, I've gotten a hold of, I mean I just have to say the city of Eric, you know, city manager Eric Wells, they're much more interested in the Spurs.

I mean you can see a real intensity of purpose in, in kind of setting up meetings with the Spurs and kind of making, you know, making this thing advance that being talks for downtown or did it ramp up quickly when one banana came in and they said, well, I mean, that's the thing.

It's there was when we first started reporting this story, we didn't you know, we didn't have any of the this was back in late June, early July, when we broke the news that, you know, the Spurs were exploring a downtown arena.

We didn't know the history of it.

We didn't know how far back in time it extended.

We thought, well, I mean, maybe there was some kind of vague idea of a downtown arena for the Spurs kind of kicking around and that when Banana Yama his his signing really kind of move things along.

You know you want a house for Wendy, right?

A really nice house.

But yeah, no, what we've found since then is Yeah, these talks were going on well before the draft.

How likely is it with the city needing to invest in either the missions or the Spurs or both, that they would be able to pull this off?

It would be extremely difficult.

I mean, and so, you know, you're talking about an arena district where, you know, you've got a spurs arena co-located with a missions stadium.

Spurs arena will cost up to $1,000,000,000, roughly.

A new minor league baseball stadium is, you know, could be anywhere in the neighborhood of 150 to $250 million.

You can check out everything about the push for the Spurs new stadium, the mission's new stadium, how likely that is with the Oracle of all that great you are to say that you are the Oracle.

Greg Jefferson, metro editor of the Express Tribune.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for coming in with your crystal ball and telling us anytime.

And thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

You can see the show again or previous shows as well as downloading the podcast.

Just go to KLRN.org Randy Beamer, and we'll see you next time on the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele.

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