AUSTIN, Texas — Heading into a hot weekend, the Texas power grid manager issued a notice showing it does “not seek additional capacity.”
On May 4, the grid manager told electric generators and producers who planned to be down for maintenance to be on standby. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) issued a notice to stakeholders showing, “ERCOT may delay/withdraw approved or accepted resource outages.”
Those approved outages give producers and generators time to make repairs.
ERCOT’s notice showed, a “possible future emergency condition of reserve capacity deficiency” starting May 6.
It showed ERCOT may need an extra 3,240 megawatts. One megawatt can power about 200 homes.
The next day, May 5, ERCOT updated the projection. The notice showed the state may need 2,930 extra megawatts.
Power plants generate electricity and the electricity gets carried on high voltage transmission lines to local distribution areas. The local distributors then send the power to homes and businesses.
Part of grid reliability is based on money.
The state needs to know there are enough payment agreements between the local distributor and the power plant. Those agreements help the power plant buy enough fuel to make electricity.
By Friday, ERCOT said it could meet a surge in demand. Some of those scheduled to go offline updated their plan, giving ERCOT the ability to handle increased loads of electricity.
You can see the current status of the grid on ERCOT’s dashboards.
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