Blame your personal power company for not being prepared
First part is correct, second part not really. While ercot doesn’t produce or move electricity, they do issue directives to the Transmission Operators (Oncor, Centerpoint, Brazos, AEP etc in TX) to shed their share of X amount of megawatts in order to preserve the integrity of the grid overall. In this case we’re talking about 20,000MW. Absolutely unprecedented. If the generators become overloaded they trip out on low frequency and it all cascades. So shedding load helps maintain frequency and/or alleviate overloaded elements.
The power companies do have somewhat of a say in that they have predetermined feeders they rotate in and out in order to not leave customers off for too long, think of it as a shared burden. Only hospitals, military, and EMS facilities aren’t effected by this. Everyone else is fair game, and was fair game, during these rotational outages.
TLDR: if people want someone to blame, blame the Obama Admin’s war on coal and shuttering power plants without a viable alternative.
Ercot does tell them to shed load but not where. That's up to the energy companies.
All the blame seems to be put on Ercot which doesn't make sense. Should they get a little blame? Yes.
But making them out to be enemy number 1 is not correct. At the end of the day Ercot follows orders and it doesn't matter if people there don't agree with it.
First part is correct, second part not really. While ercot doesn’t produce or move electricity, they do issue directives to the Transmission Operators (Oncor, Centerpoint, Brazos, AEP etc in TX) to shed their share of X amount of megawatts in order to preserve the integrity of the grid overall. In this case we’re talking about 20,000MW. Absolutely unprecedented. If the generators become overloaded they trip out on low frequency and it all cascades. So shedding load helps maintain frequency and/or alleviate overloaded elements.
The power companies do have somewhat of a say in that they have predetermined feeders they rotate in and out in order to not leave customers off for too long, think of it as a shared burden. Only hospitals, military, and EMS facilities aren’t effected by this. Everyone else is fair game, and was fair game, during these rotational outages.
TLDR: if people want someone to blame, blame the Obama Admin’s war on coal and shuttering power plants without a viable alternative.
Ercot does tell them to shed load but not where. That's up to the energy companies. All the blame seems to be put on Ercot which doesn't make sense. Should they get a little blame? Yes. But making them out to be enemy number 1 is not correct. At the end of the day Ercot follows orders and it doesn't matter if people there don't agree with it.
Also if Ercot wouldn't of issued any load shedding the entire grid would of collapsed.