Thread by @douglewinenergy

Grid update: Still extremely low chance of outages. This front is not extreme & won't bring us anywhere close to the 77GW of demand in Feb.

BUT there is a warning sign for future extreme cold: there are 10+GW of thermal plants offline right now.
1/🧵 #txlege #energytwitter

A little more info on that. You can see the amount of outages at the link below. It's updated every hour. (You have to add columns C-F to get total thermal outages).

It adds up to 10,114MW (or 10.1GW) of nuke/gas/coal plants offline right now. 2/

ercot.com/mp/data-produc…

ERCOT forecasters continue to struggle w/ demand on winter mornings. Idk why they continue to miss but ERCOT needs to address this. My guess is that they're undercounting electric heat. Note: FERC & NERC specifically said ERCOT needs to improve this. 3/

Some have noted how low prices are this morning despite moderately high demand. First of all, demand is not that high (53GW). It's less than we had at peak in October or April.

Second, wind is doing quite well this morning.
ercot.com/gridmktinfo/da…
4/

Again, there is an extremely low chance of systemwide outages. There are localized outages (~11k, w/~3k in the Houston area). These are likely caused by high winds. This is one of many reasons why no one should guarantee there won't be outages. Too many variables #txwx #txlege 5/

Peak demand from this cold weather will be tomorrow morning, projected to be 60.4GW but will likely be a bit higher. We should have enough power to meet that easily.

This is *not* an extraordinary, unusual, or extreme cold front. We get these basically every year.
#txwx 6/

The biggest questions as we prepare for potential extreme cold:
1) Why are the projections of demand still so far off
2) Why are there so many thermal plants offline?
After all the inspections, etc., 10GW (15% of the total) is quite high.
#txlege #energytwitter #txenergy
7/End🧵