Extreme Peak + Extreme Outages = ERCOT Crisis
July 19, 2021
The University of Texas at Austin has published a report on the causes of the state’s February energy crisis. The report is focused on identifying a common basis of fact to educate the debate over strategies to avoid similar problems in the future. In summary, everything failed from generation technologies to forecasts. The report offers some powerful statistics. Did you know that 2/3 of the natural gas processing plants in the Permian Basin experienced an outage? Or that offline capacity increased by 24,600 MW over a 24-hour period, or nearly the equivalent capacity of 15 nuclear power plants?