This analysis all happening everyday in accordance with FERC guidelines. ERCOT staff approve every outage and each outage must be entered into a outage coordination system that all scheduling entities must use (and everyone must use and ERCOT Qualified Scheduling Entity) then each outage is reviewed by an ERCOT outage coordination group, a transmission group, and ultimately the shift supervisor have to approve the outage. Then anytime up to 24 hours prior to the outage they can cancel it if there is any emergency present. A lot of these outages are scheduled, again through ERCOTs system with their approval, months in advance. ALL as in ALL of them have to be scheduled 2 days in advance to not be considered a Forced Outage.......forced outages are uncontrolled outages that cause an immediate need to shut down and are subject to audit.....in other words if you buy a bunch of power and then call a forced outage they are going to check to be sure you really had an emergency situation. Put in simpler terms a planned outage is planned 7 or more days (usually months due to lead time of labor and parts) think of this as getting a new radiator in your car at 100K miles big work that occurs on defined intervals, a maintenance outage is planned a minimum of 48 hours in advance and is usually the repair of something that is a known issue but the facility can operate safely till the unit can be shut down at a planned time....think crack in your windshield that they are coming to fix this weekend....forced is not coordinated and must happen for safety or reliability reasons now....this a trip, big leak, fire stuff like that think blow out of a tire you aren't going anywhere till you change it. If ERCOT has outage problems they need only blame themselves they do 100% of the coordination and it is illegal for say me and you as separate entities to coordinate outages. Out of everyone's control is the largest single generation unit the nuke at Commanche Peak is in a forced outage and that is extremely rare.
We hit a 74K load on a Sunday with temps in the 90s......that is crazy high. We are seeing the effects of the migration.....that is a real thing....ERCOT also is in charge of forecasting load daily and long term. They way they do this is they look at similar situations. With the lockdown they lost a years worth of forecasting data due to all the closures....during that year a gozillion people moved here. 74K would have been the all time record load in 2018 on 110 degree weekday with school open. So the change in humanity is a real thing. But again.....the problem is renewables. Sunday afternoon prices hit the market cap for two hours.....of the 33K installed capacity of renewables 2100 MW of generation was being exported to the grid.....if thermals ever perform like that the whole state is black. We have over built renewables that is our number one problem.....now it certainly seems we have a load issue and while I agree leadership of ERCOT should have been further out front of this they have been very good at forecasting load for decades I just think their data went stale. Also some of this is hedging on their part for appearances......ERCOT is going to CYA to death because they are going to try to lay the Feb event at the feet of the PUCT and vice versa.
The other thing we need to talk about is the hyperbole of all these stories and just overall crappy reporting they all are....I have yet to read one that is accurate from any source. We need to define a grid failure....are rolling outages where you lose power for 15 minutes every two hours over maybe a 3 hour period by design using smart meters a failure......because that's worst case today....and that isn't a failure that is operating to protect itself by design. If any outage of power is considered a failure then the grid fails somewhere every thunderstorm. All these stories are written to make it sound like the grid is held together with chewing gum and there are no rules......and all the rules (which are ALL in accordance with FERC/NERC guidelines) are literally public information. All the outage data is public information....hell after 60 days all the pricing data becomes public. And all the proposed construction projects to install more capacity are made public once approved.....fun fact there is only one thermal generation project planned in the next seven years. So an actual reporter could actually see what generation is, how it is made, what it cost, what load was, what the load forecast was, why any misses occured, what was in outage, and what is planned over the next 7 years. I came on here when Pickens announced his plan and said he would never do it because he had nothing in the approved que que....he never had a single approved project and not a single reporter of the dozens he promoted it to did the basic 5 minute exercise to check....that's how long it would have taken anyone to know it was a pipedream. When I stated that I got the response "I think a billionaire knows more about it than you" everywhere from here to alumni functions.....no it was always right in front of everyone's face and no one looked. All the information is out there......every single bit of it. There is literally nothing that a good reporter or concerned citizen can't go find out for themselves and up to this point the total sum of that group to do so is zero.
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