TEXAS, USA — ERCOT asked Texans to conserve power though Friday last week after multiple power plants unexpectedly went offline and the grid lost around 12,000 megawatts of capacity over a weekend. Many of those generators were thermal energy, meaning natural gas or coal, and ERCOT representatives promised to investigate.
"The wind output has been relatively low this week. We also had an unusual number of forced outages of thermal units so we are investigating that. We are going to try to find out why we've had as many thermal units on outage as we've had," ERCOT Vice President of Grid Planning said one week ago.
ERCOT later said the outages were caused by "equipment issues" but didn't elaborate. In fact, ERCOT is not required to even list the generators that went out until 60 days after the outages occurred.
On Thursday, however, those rules changed.
In the Thursday morning Public Utility Commission of Texas meeting, Chairman Peter Lake eventually put forward a motion that would wave that 60-day rule from June 1, 2021 to Sept. 30, 2021. This means the rule change applies retroactively, and ERCOT was given seven days to provide a list of generators that went out earlier in the month as well as information on why they went out. The information would also be available to the public. ERCOT would only have three days to release such information on any future events until the end of September.
"The first question is: Who is out and why? Let's figure that out," Lake said. "That is one of three factors that put us in a tough spot last week."
Lake said he also wanted to know if there is residual mechanical damage from the winter event and if current market conditions are, for any reason, keeping companies from providing power in an economic way. The other two factors, high energy demand and lower amounts of wind, would not be factors the state could control.
Before the final decision to wave the 60-day rule was made, Texas Competitive Power Advocates Executive Director Michele Richmond tried to push back against the idea. Richmond said she didn't know if 10 days or even 30 days was appropriate in releasing the information, and was concerned that having information on current outages available to the public.
"We need more dispatchable (energy) and not less and to an extent there are financial consequences to this in terms of providing that (information) targeting units that are out," Richmond said. "We caution you to be careful."
Richmond was concerned that some market players will act differently if they can immediately find out when other players have plants down for a period of time.
At the end of the day, however, commissioners were persuaded that more transparency is needed to get to the bottom of current grid issues. Newly-sworn-in Commissioner Lori Cobos said this cannot become a recurring issue.
"We had a significant amount of outages at the beginning of June that led to a week long conservation period. It is a situation we cannot be in all summer long," Cobos said. "We can't control everything but we need to know what's going on. Having transparency is not only important but its expected."
Commissioner Will McAdams was also willing to have transparency even if it make things less comfortable for the industry.
"I think transparency is a means to send market signals, but also signals to share holders...that this is important to reinvest in your maintenance, to adequacy perform maintenance, to meet basic reliability parameters," McAdams said. "Transparency is the one tool we have to signal to the market that you need to be doing the right thing. People are watching and, by the way, now it's not just us, but the broader public."
6 News asked ERCOT for more information about the outages. Earlier in the week, spokeswoman Leslie Sopko again said ERCOT is looking into the situation.
"Based on preliminary information received from generation owners, the vast majority of forced outages that occurred last week are due to equipment issues. Our Operations group is analyzing the information and will be providing a more comprehensive overview of the causes," Sopko said via email.
There was no timeline for when such a overview would be released.