It looks like the rotating outages have come to an end for now. A lot of people in Texas are upset. They think that the electric corporations should have know that extra power would be needed during a winter storm and be ready for it.
They are also upset with The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). They think the ERCOT should have sent out orders to the power plants to increase their output before the storm. People are also upset that ERCOT did not send out any notice to the public before they ordered the grid to start rotating outages.
Many people in the Dallas/Fort Worth area are very upset that when the utility corporations cut power to areas they did not cut it to the Super Bowl.
Something that I have not heard anyone comment on is the fact that ERCOT is traded on the stock market! The hourly prices of ERCOT usually trades at $1950.00 per megawatt hour? When ERCOT ordered rotating outages their price went up to $2000.00 per megawatt hour.
Don’t ask me what it all means. I just smell something rotten in the state of Texas.
I also object to stock market trading on things like this… And I do not even know what in the hell you call a thing like this… except .. You call it greed and you call it a crime in my book.
“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) formed in 1970, is one of eight Independent System Operators in North America, and is the successor to the Texas Interconnected System (TIS). TIS originally formed in 1941 when several power companies banded together to provide their excess generation capacity to serve industrial loads on the Gulf Coast supporting the US war effort for World War II. ERCOT is one of nine regional electric reliability councils under North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) authority. NERC and the regional reliability councils were formed following the Northeast Blackout of 1965. ERCOT's offices are located in Austin and Taylor, Texas.
The ERCOT region occupies the entire Texas Interconnection, which occupies nearly all of the state of Texas. Unlike the other major NERC interconnections, the high voltage transmission and energy market within the Texas Interconnection is operated by ERCOT as essentially a single power system instead of as a network of cooperating utility companies.
February 2011 Brownouts
On February 2, 2011, the ERCOT region was forced to endure brownouts as a severe weather system brought extremely cold weather into the area. An increase in demand, coupled with burst pipes causing the shutdown of two electricity generating plants[3], caused the council to order rolling brownouts to keep from a complete blackout. Residents across the area were without power for up to an hour at a time in cities such as San Antonio[4], Dallas-Fort Worth,[5] and Houston, [6] where temperatures dipped into the teens. [7]In Houston, provider CenterPoint Energy reported that nearly 330,000 customers were without power at one point.[8] The action was criticized by many, including U.S. Senator John Cornyn, who called for the state to "determine what needs to be done in order to maintain the electrical grid, even during severe weather."[9]…”
Wikipedia
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