ERCOT quietly dropped its latest seasonal assessment of resource adequacy on Tuesday, saying it has sufficient installed generating capacity to meet peak demand under normal system conditions this fall.

Had it not been for a press release from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, the report might have gone unnoticed for days.

Abbott, a Republican who is seeking a third term, has been hammered by his Democratic opponent, Beto O’Rourke, over the ERCOT grid’s near collapse during the February 2021 winter storm and the slow pace of the market reforms.

With Abbott providing a heavy hand, the grid operator’s public communications have shriveled since the storm. ERCOT has not posted a public notice about the seasonal assessment (SARA) since May 2021. The media updates that accompanied the SARA were discontinued after the storm, although ERCOT’s interim CEO and its top regulator have twice appeared for short Q&A sessions.

But Abbott was quick to issue a release Tuesday and tweet an image of himself sitting at the same table with outgoing interim ERCOT CEO Brad Jones, incoming CEO Pablo Vegas, Public Utility Commission Chair Peter Lake and several others. Vegas will replace Jones on Oct. 1. (See ERCOT Names NiSource’s Vegas as New CEO.)

“Met with ERCOT and PUC to discuss the strong position of Texas’ electric grid heading into the fall season,” Abbott posted. “Our grid is stronger and more reliable because of bipartisan reforms we passed and began implementing last year.”

In the release linked from the tweet, Abbott said the state is continuing to monitor the grid’s reliability. It notes he discussed the grid operator’s updated planned outage scheduling process that “ensures Texas’ generational fleet has the necessary time to conduct maintenance operations.”

The shoulder season’s traditional maintenance period couldn’t come soon enough for thermal generators that have been running full bore this summer as part of ERCOT’s conservative operations posture. The grid operator has regularly kept more than 3 GW of operating reserves on the sidelines and dispatched older peaking units as reliability unit commitments.

Scott Bruns, Enverus | Enverus

Scott Bruns, director of markets for energy analytics firm Enverus, likened the situation to having a classic car in the garage.

“These units are typically older units that are not typically run or only run during the summertime when you need to support the system. And this summer, we ran these units much longer than previous years,” Bruns said during a webinar Wednesday on ERCOT’s summer performance. “I like to think of it as like your classic Camaro that you have for cruising. It runs well, but it has a limited number of miles left on that odometer and every time that you drive it, it’s more maintenance or repairs, and it just becomes more expensive.”

And not only expensive for the generation operators, but risky for the ERCOT system.

“So now, what we’re doing is we’re asking these Camaros to spend all the time in the driveway sitting there and idling, when you know that this is just increasing the risk on the system,” Bruns said. “We’re moving to this new future where more intermittent renewables are pulling onto the system and we’re asking all of these classic cars that are sitting out along the system to provide more of these baseload reliability services. And eventually, we’re going to have some issues.”

ERCOT staff does not appear to think that will be a problem. The fall SARA, covering October and November, indicates the system will have over 93 GW of resource capacity available during peak demand hours, more than enough to meet a projected high of 64.9 GW.

The grid operator expects to have 2.6 GW operational battery storage resources. However, they are not currently included in ERCOT’s capacity contribution for fall because they are not expected to provide sustained capacity for meeting system peak loads.

The report includes six risk scenarios that reflect alternative assumptions for peak demand, unplanned thermal outages and renewable output. One of the three elevated risk scenarios (low renewable output) and the most severe extreme risk scenario (high peak load, high unplanned thermal outages, extreme low wind output) would result in rotating outages.