Thread by @gogginmichael

This weekend 30-50% of gas capacity in Southwest Power Pool, or 10-15 GW, has been on forced outage. Luckily wind has been providing 15-25% of total electricity, with only 15% of the wind fleet on outage. A few GW of coal and diesel are also offline.
marketplace.spp.org/pages/capacity…

https://twitter.com/sara_gersen/status/1361020666242244608

Now over 50% of SPP’s gas capacity is offline, leading to rolling blackouts. When utilities try to justify building gas plants they don’t account for these correlated outages, despite nearly a dozen events like this over the last decade. If they did new gas wouldn’t look good.

It sounds like around half of the gas fleet in ERCOT is also offline, leading to the rolling blackouts there. Probabilistic generation planning tools can account for correlated outages. We use them to account for correlated output profiles of wind or solar, but not fossil.

https://twitter.com/jessejenkins/status/1361348544154664961

For more on accounting for correlated outages in reliability and generation investment planning, researchers analyzed 2 million outages and found “correlated failures represent a significant resource adequacy risk” in most regions. andrew.cmu.edu/user/fs0v/pape…

Modeling correlated outages would show the value of generation diversity. If your power system is half gas capacity, like ERCOT's, adding more gas provides diminishing returns for reliability. All energy sources can be disrupted, so being too dependent on any one isn't wise.

Transmission aggregates diverse sources of electricity supply and allows imports when extreme weather takes local generation offline. For the same reason, we can decarbonize reliably and cost-effectively using transmission to access diverse wind and solar.
cleanenergygrid.org/wp-content/upl…