Are Power Companies Playing Texas Hold’em?
Jinjoo Lee, 05 July 2021
It isn’t even close to the peak of Texas’s sizzling summer season and already the state’s power grid has given out two warnings of tight conditions after a higher-than-usual volume of plants went offline. Wear and tear from the February winter storm is one possible explanation; market manipulation is another. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Warm weather and low wind output played a role, but what was surprising about the alerts—one in April, the other in June—was the number of power plants that were offline at the same time. On June 14, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator, said some 11 gigawatts of generation (roughly 15% of that day’s peak load forecast and enough to power 2.2 million homes in the summer) was on forced outage for repairs. In April, Ercot had said roughly 33 GW of generation was out of service for maintenance. Of course, that isn’t entirely surprising after the February disaster that strained the entire system and left millions without power. Continue reading “Article: Are Power Companies Playing Texas Hold’em?”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas on Monday asked residents to reduce their electricity usage through at least Friday due to “tight” power grid conditions. A number of power plants are inexplicably offline at the same time as the state is experiencing record June demand for electricity. 
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has asked people to conserve energy throughout the week as the supply of electricity on the Texas grid runs the risk of falling short of demand.
The Texas electricity market failed. Yet in the words of ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, it functioned just as designed. ERCOT has congratulated itself for losing only 40% of the grid and is proceeding to settle transactions to transfer more than $50 billion from consumers to electricity generators. Why is there such an obvious disconnect?