Many generation facilities take advantage of the milder temperatures during the spring and autumn months to perform much-needed maintenance to their plants. This is all coordinated through ERCOT (and often planned several months to years in advance) to ensure that the typical seasonal energy needs are met and that not too many units across the state are offline at once. Same goes for transmission line and substation maintenance.
However, when we have warmer/colder weather than anticipated, and the generation units are off, customers are asked to curb usage in order to alleviate burden on the lighter generation loads. A unit cannot just be suddenly switched back on like your house A/C, and it's even less possible if parts of it are removed for maintenance.
While I'm in no way defending ERCOT and the PUC for mistakes or bad decisions that they made, I can say that the requests to reduce usage are nothing new. It happens occasionally when weather situations like this arise during outage windows. Also, the summer of 2011 saw plenty of rolling blackouts to reduce usage when the temperatures were over 105 for days at a time, and there are no planned generation outages during summer months. Sometimes you just can't meet demand, and in order to mitigate risk to the grid you have to slow down usage.
We're just all more aware of ERCOT and the Texas grid now after the way the recent winter weather was handled.
Many generation facilities take advantage of the milder temperatures during the spring and autumn months to perform much-needed maintenance to their plants. This is all coordinated through ERCOT (and often planned several months to years in advance) to ensure that the typical seasonal energy needs are met and that not too many units across the state are offline at once. Same goes for transmission line and substation maintenance.
However, when we have warmer/colder weather than anticipated, and the generation units are off, customers are asked to curb usage in order to alleviate burden on the lighter generation loads. A unit cannot just be suddenly switched back on like your house A/C, and it's even less possible if parts of it are removed for maintenance.
While I'm in no way defending ERCOT and the PUC for mistakes or bad decisions that they made, I can say that the requests to reduce usage are nothing new. It happens occasionally when weather situations like this arise during outage windows. Also, the summer of 2011 saw plenty of rolling blackouts to reduce usage when the temperatures were over 105 for days at a time, and there are no planned generation outages during summer months. Sometimes you just can't meet demand, and in order to mitigate risk to the grid you have to slow down usage.
We're just all more aware of ERCOT and the Texas grid now after the way the recent winter weather was handled.