ERCOT releases summer outage data.

News

Jul 8

Written By Joseph Ajao

ERCOT releases summer outage data. But it hasn’t said why so many power plants failed.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

BY ELEANOR DEARMAN AND MARK DENT

JULY 07, 2021 06:35 PM

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas revealed Wednesday that unplanned outages at Texas power plants increased more than tenfold in June compared to May.

The data in Wednesday’s report from ERCOT identifies every plant that experienced an unplanned outage in June but does not explain why so many outages occurred or whether they were connected to damage from the February winter storm that left millions without power.

Between June 1 and June 30, power generation facilities underwent some 1,100 unexpected outages. Some of those were at the same plant or from the same generation resource. ERCOT officials said that number was not comparable to previous Junes.

In May, the number of outages didn’t hit 90, according to a Star-Telegram analysis of the ERCOT figures.

May was an unseasonably cool and rainy month for Texas. In June, temperatures and power usage shot up, the latter to near-record levels of 69,000 megawatts the week of June 14. The combination of heavy energy usage and unexpected failures at power generation facilities prompted ERCOT to ask Texans to conserve energy between June 14 to June 18, despite ERCOT reporting in May it expected the grid to have a capacity of 86,000 megawatts this summer.

At one point during the week of June 14, more than 12,000 megawatts were offline, roughly 11,000 of which was for unplanned outages. Warren Lasher, ERCOT’s senior director of system planning, said he was “deeply concerned” by the number of plants that went offline.

Wednesday’s report comes after the Public Utility Commission directed ERCOT, the organization that manages Texas’ power grid, to provide details about summer outages on an accelerated timeline. (Future outage data will be released regularly through Sept. 1.)

Missing from ERCOT, just as it was the week of June 14, is an explanation for the unusually high number of unplanned outages that led to the request for conservation. The data included sparse details about causes, using descriptions like other, unknown, exhaust problems, tube leak and turbine repair.

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https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/article252637298.html