ERCOT issues notice to ease Texas power grid stress

June 16, 2021

This morn­ing ERCOT had a con­fer­ence call with mem­bers of the Leg­is­la­ture and the PUC to go over the recent stress on the Texas grid.

ERCOT saw a num­ber of fac­tors affect the grid begin­ning this week on Sun­day and going into Mon­day that we have not expe­ri­enced before:

• Wind gen­er­a­tion was less than half of what was expect­ed based on his­tor­i­cal performance
• High num­ber of unex­pect­ed mechan­i­cal fail­ures at our gen­er­a­tion sites across the State
• Unusu­al­ly high demand not seen before this month of June.

In response to these events, ERCOT called on all gen­er­a­tion plants to come online to help meet this demand, as well as issued a week long con­ser­va­tion notice through Fri­day out of cau­tion even as more gen­er­a­tion sites come online. While these con­ser­va­tion notices are in response to the stress on the grid, we are not in dan­ger of fail­ure or col­lapse of the grid as a whole. The notice is tem­po­rary and is sim­ply a tool to pre­vent more extreme mea­sures sim­i­lar to what we saw dur­ing the win­ter storm in February.

ERCOT has assured us that they are inves­ti­gat­ing these events and will be improv­ing their com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the pub­lic as they nav­i­gate the process.