Thread by @douglewinenergy

Yesterday at 6:31CT, one of the four nuclear units in Texas stopped producing power. A new fast acting backup reserve (ECRS, which is mostly batteries) stabilized the grid & prevented bigger problems. ERCOT has said nothing about this outside of what's below but... (cont) #txlege

...this is potentially a big deal. The public deserves answers about what this means for this week. If it doesn't come back by Tuesday, the probability of rolling outages is higher than it otherwise would be. ERCOT is projecting a margin of only 2,582MW at 7pm Tuesday. Not good.

I still think at this point the power will stay on, but it's becoming more important to tell the public to pre-cool homes early in the day & try to use less between 6-8pm. Would be better for this to be systematic and valued, so ERCOT would have another tool to deploy if needed.

There are right now nearly 10 gigawatts of thermal power plants offline. "Typical" is 5GW, "high" is 8.5GW" and "extreme" is 11.2GW, so we're right now almost exactly in between high and extreme but the trend is not good. Those numbers are trending up over the last week. #txlege

To have outages, you generally need 3 things all to happen:
✔️ high demand (projected to be 82.6GW of Tuesday; all time record is 80)
✔️high thermal outages (nearing extreme levels)
✖️low wind & solar (looking to be at or near ERCOT projections for normal levels). #energytwitter

I'm not worried about Tuesday / Wednesday outages yet, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

This is a test not only of the grid but of the communications from @ERCOT_ISO & @PUCTX .

So far, they're sorely lacking. 6/end 🧵
#txlege #txenergy #energytwitter