ERCOT comfortably met demand during last week’s latest round of winter weather, a welcome change from last February’s disaster under much more severe conditions.

Demand peaked at 68.9 GW Friday morning, far short of early projections of 75 GW and failing to eclipse record demand of 69.2 GW set during last year’s winter storm. Had demand reached last February’s estimated 77 GW that came after widespread and dayslong outages began, ERCOT would have handled that too, as it had as much as 22 GW of reserve capacity at times.

Customer outages topped out around 70,000 on Thursday, a result of ice accumulation and falling tree limbs on power lines. It was a far cry from the millions that were left without power for days last February. By Monday morning, Poweroutage.us was tracking 7,500 outages in Texas.

The weather helped too. Temperatures were not as low as they were last February, dipping into the 20s rather than single digits, with not more than 3 inches of snow falling northwest of Dallas. Houston’s low Friday was 26 degrees Fahrenheit, double last year’s low of 13 degrees, and sub-freezing temperatures lasted only 18 straight hours, compared to 44 consecutive hours in 2021.

Renewable energy, which initially took the fall from Texas politicians for last year’s shortfall, overperformed last week. Staff said that at times, wind farms were providing nearly a third of ERCOT’s power supply.

The ERCOT grid came within minutes of a total collapse last February as more than 51 GW of mostly thermal generation was rendered inoperable by freezing temperatures and ice. (See ERCOT: Grid was ‘Seconds and Minutes’ from Total Collapse.)

Legislation passed in the wake of last year’s storm required all generation resources to be weatherized and allowed plants to burn alternative fuels, such as fuel oil. The grid operator released a winterization report last month that said 321 of 324 generation units and transmission facilities passed their inspections.

During a press conference Friday with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other agency officials at the state’s emergency operations center in Austin, interim ERCOT CEO Brad Jones said no significant power plant outages were reported — about 7.5 GW — and the number of resources that failed were below expectations.

“We believe the weatherization and our preparations have been extraordinary and are pretty successful,” Jones said.

Even the state’s natural gas system, widely seen within the electric industry as its Achilles’ heel, came through. There were some early production drops that regulators said did not cut into supplies — nothing like the 50% drop in production last year.

“We are operating as expected with natural gas coming into the system,” Texas Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick said Friday. “Fluctuations in production have been brief and expected.”

The Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, has yet to draft new weatherization requirement that likely won’t be in place until 2023.

Abbott was quick to jump on the grid’s performance. “The Texas electric grid is more reliable and more resilient than it has ever been,” he said during the briefing.

The governor later listed on Twitter the improvements he said had been made to the grid. “Fear-mongers should be ashamed,” he tweeted.

Alison Silverstein | Advanced Power Alliance

“Happily, this storm was not an arctic event, so the bulk power system held up well,” said Alison Silverstein, an Austin-based energy consultant and former FERC and Texas Public Utility Commission staffer. “But Gov. Abbott exaggerates the grid’s readiness for very cold winter weather.”

“Texas got lucky. The weather wasn’t that bad … so demand stayed below projections,” Stoic Energy president Doug Lewin said.

Silverstein told RTO Insider that ERCOT’s grid is “certainly more reliable and resilient” than it was before last February’s winter storm. She credited power plant winterization requirements, the PUC’s restructuring of energy pricing through a lower price cap and a modified operating reserve demand curve, and enabling additional demand response.

But, she cautioned, there is more work to do before the grid can be considered “truly more reliable and resilient.”

“ERCOT needs to better understand and serve short-term fast-ramping operational needs with resources like fast generation, demand response, batteries and virtual power plants. ERCOT also needs to improve its load forecasting and seasonal adequacy assessment methodology,” Silverstein said.

“But the simplest, lowest-cost way to make the ERCOT grid more reliable is to invest in energy efficiency for Texas homes and businesses, because lower, more manageable loads make it easier for the grid to be reliable and resilient every single day,” she said.

Silverstein said her biggest worry is “no one’s sharing the math for how much all of the ERCOT’s conservative operations measures are going to cost or whether the PUCT’s new market proposals are going to work, and at what cost.”

SPP, MISO Handle Demand

SPP returned its Eastern Interconnection footprint to normal operations Friday afternoon, saying it had enough generation to meet demand and available reserves, and that it did not foresee extreme or abnormal reliability threats.

The RTO issued weather and resource advisories earlier in the week but never resorted to conservative operations. Demand peaked at 40.6 GW Thursday morning, well below the grid operator’s record winter peak of 43.7 GW set last February.

Spokesperson Meghan Sever said icing outages and derates of wind resources were significantly less than predicted, as much of the icing occurred south of SPP’s main wind corridor. She credited action steps taken from the RTO’s comprehensive review of its response to the 2021 winter storm and the weather and resource advisories issued last week as helping meet the footprint’s demand.

MISO officials also used lessons learned from previous winter storms to “anticipate operational needs and identify solutions as quickly as possible” in easily meeting demand.

The RTO issued a severe weather alert and conservative operations for its Central region and Arkansas on Feb. 2-4, requesting members update their generation and transmission availability in its outage tracking system.