FORT WORTH, Texas — The Electric Reliability Council of Texas revealed Wednesday that unplanned outages at Texas power plants increased more than tenfold in June compared to May.
The data in Wednesday’s report from ERCOT identifies every plant that experienced an unplanned outage in June but does not explain why so many outages occurred or whether they were connected to damage from the February winter storm that left millions without power.
Between June 1 and June 30, power generation facilities underwent some 1,100 unexpected outages. Some of those were at the same plant or from the same generation resource. ERCOT officials said that number was not comparable to previous Junes.
In May, the number of outages didn’t hit 90, according to a Star-Telegram analysis of the ERCOT figures.
May was an unseasonably cool and rainy month for Texas. In June, temperatures and power usage shot up, the latter to near-record levels of 69,000 megawatts the week of June 14. The combination of heavy energy usage and unexpected failures at power generation facilities prompted ERCOT to ask Texans to conserve energy between June 14 to June 18, despite ERCOT reporting in May it expected the grid to have a capacity of 86,000 megawatts this summer.
At one point during the week of June 14, more than 12,000 megawatts were offline, roughly 11,000 of which was for unplanned outages. Warren Lasher, ERCOT’s senior director of system planning, said he was “deeply concerned” by the number of plants that went offline.
Wednesday’s report comes after the Public Utility Commission directed ERCOT, the organization that manages Texas’ power grid, to provide details about summer outages on an accelerated timeline. (Future outage data will be released regularly through Sept. 1.)
Missing from ERCOT, just as it was the week of June 14, is an explanation for the unusually high number of unplanned outages that led to the request for conservation. The data included sparse details about causes, using descriptions like other, unknown, exhaust problems, tube leak and turbine repair.
Leslie Sopko, a spokesperson for ERCOT, told the Star-Telegram that ERCOT is seeking information from power generators and has given them a deadline of July 16. She said ERCOT would review the answers before putting them in a digestible format.
Complications with the grid have continued to reverberate around the state.
This week, Gov. Greg Abbott called on the PUC to take actions he said would make the power grid more reliable.
He told commission leadership to “streamline incentives within the ERCOT market to foster the development and maintenance of adequate and reliable sources of power, like natural gas, coal, and nuclear power.” Abbott also wants ERCOT to create a maintenance schedule for natural gas, coal and nuclear generators to keep too many of them from going offline at once.
The governor directed the PUC to “allocate reliability costs to generation resources that cannot guarantee their own availability, such as wind or solar power.”
“Electric generators are expected to provide enough power to meet the needs of all Texans,” he said in a letter to PUC leadership. “When they fail to do so, those generators should shoulder the costs of that failure.”
During last month’s power shortage, about 80% of power that went offline came from fossil fuel plants, according to ERCOT. And in the winter storm, fossil fuels accounted for the majority of power generation outages.
“Governor Abbott’s letter to the PUC will actually make Texas electricity costlier and less reliable, while skewing the playing field to favor aging thermal power plants over new renewables,” Daniel Cohan, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Rice University who studies the power grid, said in a tweet.
Abbott also released his agenda for July’s special legislative session Wednesday. It did not include action related to the power grid.
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