The events of the last week in the Texas ERCOT market area have become fodder for every conceivable agenda, viewpoint, and argument, including political, environmental, and even cultural debates. Unfortunately, few of these arguments have been supported by facts – usually they are based on cherry-picked anecdotes, and echoed dubious news stories and memes. I had the opportunity to sit in a webinar called “ERCOT Power Grid Outage: What Went Wrong?” presented by Enverus, one of the leading data and analytics providers in the global energy markets (to see a replay of that webinar, visit here). As Enverus’ analysts laid out hard facts and figures in their presentations this last Monday (just a few days following the meltdown), it became clear that most of what is referred to as “facts” in the popular press about the events are either being misinterpreted due to ignorance about the structure and authority of ERCOT or are simply attempts to force fit bits of data into a narrative supporting a preferred message. During the worst of the storm, the news was telling the story that much of the wind generation that had been scheduled had gone offline, putting pressure on the remaining generation resources,… continue reading
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