Ice Storm Hammers Texas; 400K Customer Outages Reported

ERCOT easily met demand last week as icy weather swept through the state and created local distribution outages affecting as many as 400,000 customers at one point.

The grid operator’s load never averaged more than the 65.56 GW it did during the early evening hours of Jan. 31, when the storm swept through the northern half of state. Demand peaked at 73.96 GW during the December winter storm, a 16-GW increase from ERCOT’s previous high for the month.

Most of the outages were centered on Austin and Northeast Texas, where trees succumbed to the icy accumulation in what locals referred to as an “oakpocalypse.” Some observers pointed to lax vegetation management and opposition to tree-trimming measures as the primary reason for the outages.

The National Weather Service’s forecast for icy conditions in Texas. | WeatherBell

 

Austin Energy, the city’s municipal utility, had more than 163,000 customer outages at one point. By Sunday morning, it had reduced that total to 44,000, meaning some customers had been without power for 102 hours, longer than they were during the deadly 2021 winter storm.

Oncor, which serves much of North Texas, said Saturday it had restored power to the “vast majority” of its customers. The utility reported more than 140,000 customer outages Thursday morning.

Texas still had more than 65,000 customer outages Sunday morning, according to poweroutage.us.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said ERCOT maintained “ample supply” during the week and reminded his Twitter audience that outages were caused by “local issues.” On Saturday, he declared disaster conditions for seven counties affected by the storm.

Calpine to Develop Gas Peaker

Calpine said Friday it will begin developing a 425-MW peaking facility at an existing power plant site following the Texas Public Utility Commission’s recent adoption of a framework intended to incent new generation.

The PUC last month agreed on the principles necessary to replace ERCOT’s energy-only market with a performance credit mechanism (PCM). The design rewards generators with credits based on their performance during a determined number of scarcity hours. Those credits must either be bought by load-serving entities, or exchanged between them and generators in a voluntary forward market. (See Texas PUC Submits Reliability Plan to Legislature.)

“The PCM framework adopted last week by the [PUC] sends a strong signal of support for maintaining a reliable grid in [Texas] through market-based mechanisms rather than government mandates,” Calpine tweeted.

The company is a member of Texas Competitive Power Advocates, which promised to build 4.6 GW of additional capacity if the PCM is adopted.

“We are encouraged that the PUC is acting to ensure Texas maintains a reliable power supply through market-based mechanisms rather than government handouts,” Calpine said in a press release. “Regulatory certainty on PCM will be critical as Calpine continues to move this project forward.”

The peaker will be built next to the Freestone Energy Center, a 794-MW combined cycle gas plant between Dallas and Houston. Calpine must secure an air permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality; a spokesman said the project’s front-end development will take 12 to 18 months.

61-MW Gas Plant to Retire

Blue Cube Operations, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical (NYSE:DOW), notified ERCOT on Friday that it plans to decommission and retire a gas-fired plant south of Houston on July 4.

The combined cycle steam turbine has a 61-MW summer seasonal net max sustainable rating and a 58-MW minimum rating. The unit was commissioned in 1982 and is paired with a Dow cogeneration facility.

ERCOT normally conducts a reliability-impact analysis before approving a resource’s suspension of operations. It said in a market notice last month that it has not designated any generation facility as necessary to avoid an adverse reliability impact in the planning horizon of more than one year.

ERCOT.com Adds 6-day Forecast

ERCOT on Friday unveiled a new six-day forecast on its supply-and-demand dashboard as part of its continued effort to increase transparency into grid operations. The dashboard displays the system’s current capacity and demand using real-time data from hourly forecasts and other sources.

The forecasts can be found from the Grid and Market Conditions page on ERCOT’s website.

“While the supply and demand forecasts may change, as weather forecasts do, the dashboard provides a general ‘heads-up’ on the trends based on currently known information,” Dan Woodfin, vice president of system operations, said in a release.