ERCOT will soon add an extra 226 MW of capacity to the market with recent announcements that two resources will come out of seasonal mothball status.

Austin Energy told the grid operator on Wednesday that it is returning the wood-fired Nacogdoches Power, the country’s largest biomass plant, to year-round service on Oct. 15. The plant, which the municipal utility acquired from Southern Power in 2019, had been operating on a seasonal basis during the summer.

Last week, Garland’s municipal utility notified ERCOT that it was bringing back a pair of gas-fired units that had been mothballed in 2018. The two units at Garland’s Spencer plant have a total capacity of 118 MW.

ERCOT has said it has enough capacity to meet a fall demand peak of 65 GW by at least 30 GW, but staff told regulators last week that forced or maintenance generator outages continue to approach 10 GW a day. (See ERCOT: Sufficient Capacity to Meet Fall Demand.)

Brad Jones Named to Reliability Council

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday included interim ERCOT CEO Brad Jones among six appointees to the new Texas Energy Reliability Council, which was established by legislation this summer in response to February’s Winter Storm Uri.

The other appointees represent three of Texas’ four largest urban areas: Houston, San Antonio and Austin. They are:

• • • Nate Murphy, senior counsel for refiner Valero, San Antonio;
    • George Presses, vice president of fuel and energy for the H.E.B. grocery chain, San Antonio;
    • Edward Stones, global business director for energy and climate change for Dow, Houston;
    • Jon Taylor, corporate vice president of fab (silicon wafers) engineering and public affairs at Samsung Austin Semiconductor, Austin; and
    • Melissa Trevino, assistant vice president for power at Occidental Energy Ventures, Houston.

Senate Bill 3 tasks the council with overseeing the grid’s weatherization and improving communication in the state’s energy and electric industries.