H-E-B and Central Market’s head of energy, George Presses, shows two slides when he makes a pitch to management: a bright, busy store and one that’s dark, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of perishables going bad.
“Everyone takes electricity for granted,” said Presses, vice president of fuel and energy for the San Antonio-based grocer.
While Texas’ electric grid failed to provide reliable power during last month’s winter storm, a complicated and redundant system that H-E-B and Central Market have created with Houston-based Enchanted Rock Energy passed the difficult test.
The system, which includes installing a natural gas-powered generator behind a supermarket, costs H-E-B about $1 million per store. For that, H-E-B gets uninterrupted electricity during outages, saving as much as $500,000 in perishable food in a typical store.
So far, H-E-B has installed 161 generators around Texas, including at its Central Market stores in Dallas, Fort Worth and Plano. Its Southlake Central Market doesn’t have a generator, and it lost electricity and was closed during the February power outages.
Only about 40 of H-E-B’s 351 stores in the state lost power. Contrast that with the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, which had about 500 stores without power at various times during those five days in February, most of them in Texas.
H-E-B, known for its operations acumen and coming to the rescue with water and hot meals during hurricanes, doesn’t like to leave the details to others. The retailer started looking for solutions in 2015 when a new store in Lake Jackson lost power on the day of its grand opening.
The next year, H-E-B signed a formal agreement with Enchanted Rock of Houston, an energy technology company founded in 2006 to create long-duration backup power micro-grids that it owns, operates and maintains. Last summer, the city of Houston hired the company to build a system to keep its water purification plants operating during power outages.
On the line
Presses remembers the date the first generator was installed because it was the first test of his expensive project.
The generator was installed at the Bay City H-E-B store on Dec. 23, 2016. On Jan. 20, 2017, the store had a power outage.
“It worked perfectly,” he said. The system takes zero to eight seconds to start supplying full power after an outage. “Most of the time a store doesn’t even know it’s had a power outage until we tell them.”
The second generator, in Houston, also performed well during an outage soon after it was installed.
Hurricane Harvey, which was the most expensive storm in Texas before February’s freeze, was a huge test. Since then, H-E-B has been installing the iROC package, which stands for Integrated Reliability on Call, wherever it can.
Besides the cost, there are other considerations when the company decides to add iROC to a store.
The shopping center has to have the space, the natural gas supply has to have the pressure and ability to expand, and the electrical operator has to agree to connect with a proprietary transfer switch, Presses said. The 40 stores that were out of power in February were all in the Austin market, where H-E-B doesn’t have an agreement with Austin Energy.
“There’s nothing stopping others from doing this, but it’s about how you value your position in the economy,” Presses said. “We think we’re indispensable.”
Seeing that customers can also depend on the store to warm up or recharge their phones is gratifying, he said. “All my friends in Houston know which H-E-B stores have a generator. When power was out after the Dallas tornadoes, people were in the café at our Midway Central Market all the time to charge up their phones.”
Tired infrastructure
Texas’ unpredictable weather forced H-E-B to come up with a way to marginalize its risk, Presses said, but that’s only part of the reason the company is investing in iROC.
Presses likes to tell people that the oldest appliance in your house isn’t the TV or the refrigerator — it’s the transformer your home is hooked up to.
Most of the nation’s high-voltage transmission infrastructure was built in the 1960s and 1970s and isn’t equipped to accommodate the way people are using electricity today, according to a recent report from the Business Roundtable.
Extreme weather such as Category 4 hurricanes and the arctic blast that covered the entire state of Texas last month will continue to put more pressure on the electric grid.
The Texas power outage was the topic of a hearing in Washington on Thursday before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology chaired by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas.
Princeton University engineering professor Jesse Jenkins testified that planning and building resilience is “more difficult now more than ever because of the change in climate means the past is no longer a safe guide to the future.”
In San Antonio, H-E-B also built and operates its own solar energy system that connects 62 buildings — stores, warehouses and food manufacturing plants.
“We derive the entire benefit of the energy, and it’s saved us money,” Presses said.
Power isn’t as visible as potholes, Presses said, but the problems are still there.
His ecosystem is a grocery chain that’s a demanding user of electricity. When he started working for H-E-B 23 years ago, “our stores weren’t as energy-intensive. Now we cook more and have more fresh and prepared foods.”
After an outage, ovens can take 24 hours to get back up to required productivity levels, stores have to be cleaned and customers can’t shop, he said.
“It’s a lot harder for us to lose power today,” Presses said. “Unfortunately, for all of us, we’re probably going to see more and more of this.”
Twitter: @MariaHalkias
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