Texas’ electric grid operator is determined to avoid last week’s cold weather emergency, with plans to more than double the amount of power it has ready to bring on line and to ask for more conservation efforts.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said in a notice it would pay to have an additional 3,000 megawatts of power plant capacity ready for real-time operations from Wednesday through Saturday, when below-freezing temperatures are expected to return to much of the state.
+++++
Update:
ERCOT is asking consumers to conserve electricity from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. over the next few days to help reduce the risk of outages.
Wednesday’s peak demand is currently projected to be more than 54,000 megawatts between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. and more than 58,000 megawatts between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Thursday — which would set a new winter record. The current winter peak demand record is 56,334 megawatts, set Feb. 2 between 7 and 8 p.m.
+++++
Typically ERCOT has a minimum of 2,300 megawatts of daily operating reserves it schedules. These are reserves that ERCOT controllers in Austin can call on at a moment’s notice to smooth out imbalances in the system. It isn’t the same thing as the 13.75 percent long-term reserve margin ERCOT aims to keep, which is a measurement of how much total system capacity there is above an expected summertime peak. It’s capacity that ERCOT itself is paying for to keep things in balance on a daily basis.
Typical daily operating reserves are closer to 3,000 megawatts per day, however, with up to another 2,000 megawatts of reserves than can be on line within 30 minutes, said ERCOT spokeswoman Dottie Roark.
The plan for later this weeks is to have yet another 3,000 megawatts available to ERCOT operations — the equivalent of 10 typical natural-gas-fired plants or six coal-fired units.
The weather outlook seems much milder than last week, when much of the state stayed below freezing even during daylight hours.
http://www.ercot.com/news/press_releases/2011/nr02-08-11
“Turn thermostats to 68 degrees or below in the daytime and to 55 degrees at night or when leaving for the day.”
——-
You have lost your ever friggin mind ERCOT. May the people of higher authority DISSOLVE ERCOT!!!!!!
Embarassing that any conservation should be asked for in 2011. The only reason we have to do this in the US is due to crap environmental policies. Liberals turn back societal gains every single year and it is getting very tiresome. So long Star Trek, hello Dark Ages.
Everyone needs to call/write their state rep and demand an investigation into this. There should be no reason this should happen. As the Attorney General said last time this happened, power is no where near its peak levels. You can look it up on this website and e-mail them. http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/
The answer is very simple. Build more nuclear plants which will create thousands of jobs and have on hand adaquate power for the state of Texas.
Should we evacuate? I’m still waiting on this turkey to cook from last week’s debacle. Takes a long time to do turkey at 75 degrees. Intermittently.
Why is this happening in the winter? We use much more electricity in the summer, and I am willing to bet the majority of people have central GAS heaters rather than electric. So if we’re using gas, as I do myself, why is the “demand” so high?
Fred, I suspect that the rolling outages experienced by Texans have more to do with electrical utility deregulation than they do with liberals. We had a bad cold snap back in 1985 or so that accompanied blizzard like conditions in Austin, and the electricity didn’t go off then. But now the same thing happens after deregulation & what do we get? Outages. As someone posted earlier, folks should be writing their representatives & raising cain over this.
If we assemble a firing squad for those who fail our problems would disappear.
Because they are selling the electricity YOU pay for across the State line. Now I agree with the poster who says the liberal leftie tree huggers may have put us in a position where this can even get close to be needed – It is time we told the liberal leftie tree huggers to get out of our way drilling, building refineries and power plants or BE RUN OVER AND SMASHED – like a sail-cat.