Thread by @douglewinenergy

Grid update: Demand forecast is much lower than last night but ERCOT missed its forecast by 23% last night so that's cold comfort. A miss that bad tonight & conditions would be tight. Reports of gas supply ⬇️ 8bcf overall, ~3bcf in the Permian. Gas/coal outages ~9.5GW. #txlege 1/

Add it all up & still low chance of outages tonight, though higher than last night, esp. given the massive demand miss. #ERCOT and @PUCTX simply have to get better at forecasting demand and improving #energyefficiency. More on that here: 2/
douglewin.substack.com/p/2022-cold-sn…

I said coming into this the two biggest wild card were power demand & gas supply. The drops in gas output weren't enough to cause problems yet. I don't think this level of reduction would cause outages. Keepin an eye on it though. #energytwitter #natgas 3/

https://twitter.com/gersonjr/status/1606409979522682881?s=20&t=1uGqyvkKedrhPySkFtHATA

By comparison, during Uri, (acc'g to FERC/NERC) "By February 14, natural gas wellhead and gathering facility production declined by over 30 percent" (p.100). With 3bcf out today, that's a little over 10%. The lack of snow and ice and warmer temps are major differences. 4/

Note that ERCOT has no direct info on gas supply and there is no gas market monitor. FERC and NERC recommendation: "Continue to improve awareness by BAs [ERCOT] of the fuel status of generating units." ERCOT's asked for this but still doesn't have it. #txlege #txenergy 5/

It was a reat day for #solar which peaked around 7.6GW helping tremendously today. Hopefully thermal units which peaked at 12.5 GW of outages this morning had time to recover for tonight. About 3GW back online. #Solar & #wind performance may have bought them time to recover. 6/

We need to think of the #ERCOT grid as a *system*. No one resource can handle everything. They need to complement each other. Wind was fantastic last night, solar today, going to need gas to come through for us tonight. Looking ok for now. #txlege 7/

With less wind, hopefully local outages (and yes, the distribution grid IS part of the grid) will be far less. Had >100,000 yesterday. Under 30,000 today.

Thank you line workers!! Those folks are so important to all of us. Thank 'em if you see one. #txenergy #txwx

That's it for now. If the demand forecast is close (peak ~67GW) & there aren't gas supply or power plant problems bigger than now, we'll be ok w/ projected capacity tonight >72GW. Would be better if we were more energy efficient! Will udpate as needed. Stay warm! 9/End #txenergy