Ever since a pair of run-of-the-mill conservation alerts in April and June spooked Texans still reeling from February’s winter storm, ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission have dialed back their communications efforts.

ERCOT has used social media twice since June, tweeting out the only two press releases the grid operator had issued in the interim. The most recent seasonal resource adequacy assessment (SARA), usually issued in a release and followed by a conference call with state and industry media, was quietly distributed in a market notice. (See ERCOT: Sufficient Capacity to Meet Fall Demand.)

A similar effort with the highly anticipated winter SARA, the first since the February storm, fell flat when the report was posted on the ERCOT website early Friday afternoon, only to disappear shortly thereafter. But it was taken down too late. Social media users had already taken notice, with one twitterer downloading the assessment and offering it to others.

The SARA was eventually posted before the close of business Friday.

ERCOT’s communications staff said that “to the best of [their] knowledge,” they didn’t post the initial report that was subsequently pulled down and were working to figure out what happened.

“There wasn’t any conspiracy or planned effort to post and pull down,” said Chris Schein, ERCOT’s interim communications director.

Matters were compounded later Friday when word began to spread on Twitter that Elaine Mendoza, one of ERCOT’s newest board members, had abruptly resigned. The PUC responded to media requests but did not issue a press release in what some saw as a pre-Thanksgiving news dump.

Texas Monthly’s Russell Gold broke the news of Mendoza’s resignation while he was stranded at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport.

“It’s a bad look for ERCOT [and] Texas politicians who promised us reform [and] transparency [and] competency,” Gold said, expressing frustration with the radio silence.

Doug Lewin, a consultant with Stoic Energy and close observer of the ERCOT market, agreed.

“I’m deeply frustrated and concerned about the assessment of winter resource adequacy,” he told RTO Insider. “Everyone agreed communication and planning needed improvement, but [Friday] demonstrated little has changed; it might be worse.”

It’s not that communications has taken a back seat at ERCOT since the winter storm. A dozen of interim CEO Brad Jones’ 60-point “Roadmap to Improving Grid Reliability” items deal directly with communications and others tangentially touch on it. No. 33 deals with educating the public and news media about energy emergencies and operational notices and reviewing existing practices around conservation alerts to “minimize false alarms and public fatigue.”

Jones is also in the middle of a listening tour across the state, visiting city councils and holding town halls. The tour continues in December with seven more stops, including Dallas, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, where ERCOT has placed an emphasis on adding transmission infrastructure.

Since Jones’ arrival, ERCOT has reduced the number of media interviews and cut back on the number of press releases and their social media activity. Officials have said they are focused on “making the necessary changes to protect Texans against the next winter storm.”

ERCOT Sees 62 GW of Peak Demand

ERCOT said assuming “typical winter grid conditions,” it anticipates having 85 GW of installed generating capacity to meet a forecasted winter peak demand of 62 GW. The latter is about 10 GW less than the grid operator’s peak demand before it began to lose generation resources during the winter storm.

The grid operator said it included additional low-probability, high-impact scenarios in the winter SARA as part of its “aggressive grid-management planning.” The assessment assumes nearly 9 GW of thermal outages based on historical data from the past three winters but excludes unplanned outages from last February because of the storm’s “exceptional impact.”

The extreme risk scenarios were expanded to include a new “extreme low” renewables output assumption and estimated renewable and thermal and outage improvements, ERCOT said, citing the PUC’s new weatherization standard and the natural gas industry’s “voluntary weatherization activities.” (See “Weatherization Rules in Effect,” Texas PUC Nears Market Redesign’s Finish Line.)

Twitter users were quick to poke holes in ERCOT’s assessment. Andrew Dressler, an atmospheric sciences professor at Texas A&M University and a climate scientist, has concluded that hourly peak demand was actually 82 GW at one point during the storm.

“[ERCOT staff] never show how they arrive at that number, and they have an incentive to low-ball the estimate,” tweeted Dressler, who was the first to notice the initial posting of the assessment.

“No rules, no enforcement, no fines from the [gas regulatory Texas Railroad Commission], just ‘voluntary efforts’ from an industry that made $11 [billion] in one week, but sure, they probably winterized [and] voluntarily gave up those profits this winter, right?” Lewin said in another Twitter thread.

Despite the lack of publicity, the ensuring media coverage still resulted in the same headline officials may have been working to avoid: “Texas grid vulnerable to blackouts during severe weather”; “ERCOT report says Texans face steep shortfalls in power capacity if extreme event hits this winter”; and “Extreme weather still threatens Texas’ electric grid.”

While ERCOT did not publicize the SARA report, it did issue a market notice to its participants.

A&M a Market Participant?

Mendoza’s departure leaves ERCOT four directors short of a full board before its annual meeting of members on Dec. 10. She was only named to the board on Nov. 1. (See Three More Directors Added to ERCOT Board.)

PUC spokesman Michael Hoke confirmed Mendoza’s resignation from the board on Friday. He said a “re-examination” of her role as a regent of Texas A&M University found a potential conflict with her ability to serve on the ERCOT board.

Texas A&M has a 50-MW generation facility that primarily serves the campus but also has the ability to offer into the ERCOT market as a resource entity. That makes Texas A&M a market participant, Hoke said, and new legislation prohibits market participants from serving on the board.

“This was done out of an abundance of caution,” Hoke said in a statement to RTO Insider.

Schein said ERCOT is not involved in board selection or communications around the appointment. That responsibility lies with the Board Selection Committee, a three-person group selected by Texas’ political leadership and that coordinates appointment announcements through the PUC.

Mendoza is founder and CEO of Conceptual MindWorks, a medical informatics company in San Antonio, where she has been involved in expanding educational opportunities, health care and economic growth.

Senate Bill 2 replaced the five unaffiliated directors and eight market segment representatives with eight independent directors chosen by the selection committee. The ERCOT CEO, the PUC chair and the Texas Office of Public Utility Counsel’s CEO sit on the body as non-voting members.

The law requires each board member to be a Texas resident with executive-level experience in finance, business, engineering, trading, risk management, law or electric market design. When the winter storm nearly brought the ERCOT system to total collapse, Texans frustrated with the ensuing long-term outages directed their ire toward the six board members who lived outside the state. (See ERCOT Chair, 4 Directors to Resign.)