State’s power grid operator expects “tight” summer

There's enough capacity to serve demands March through May. After that, they're not sure.

Julia Robinson/Special contributor

Control Operator Kenneth Taylor monitors energy generation at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas' control center in Bastrop.

Summer’s on its way; so too yet another round of warnings from the power grid operator serving most of the state. That’s the latest from Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which issued a release this morning that says “the amount of electricity available to serve consumer demand will be tight again” due to a combination of factors, among them high demand and a long-range forecast suggesting yet another long, hot and extremely dry summer.

“Current estimates indicate that we likely will see very tight conditions on the hottest days,” said Kent Saathoff, vice president of Grid Operations and System Planning for ERCOT, in this morning’s release. “There is a significant chance that ERCOT will need to issue Energy Emergency Alerts and appeal to consumers to reduce their energy use on some of those days.”

ERCOT released two reports this morning: a spring assessment and a preliminary summer look-ahead.

The former says that from March to May, at least, ERCOT expects to have “sufficient installed generating capacity to serve forecasted peak demands with expected generation outages in the upcoming spring season.” But after that, things get a little more tenuous, even with more resources available in coming months, among them Luminant’s mothballed Monticello power plants in far northeast Texas, which are scheduled to come back online this summer.

“If a higher‐than‐normal number of forced generation outages occur during a period of high demand or if record‐breaking weather conditions similar to the summer of 2011 lead to even higher‐than-expected peak demands,” says the preliminary summer report, “these EEA declarations may be followed by a need to institute rotating outages to maintain the integrity of the system as a whole. In these scenarios, the ERCOT system would likely have insufficient resources available to serve customer demand.”

A final summer report will be available in May.