JesseJenkins

Main story continues to be the failure of thermal power plants -- natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants -- which ERCOT counts on to be there when needed. They've failed. Of about 70,000 MW of thermal plants in ERCOT, ~25-30,000 MW have been out since Sunday night. Huge problem.

ERCOT started directing electric utilities (like Oncor or Austin Electic) to start rolling blackouts or involuntary emergency load shedding at 1:25am on Monday morning, with 10,500 MW shed during that late morning. That's ~2 million homes worth of load http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225210 …

Throughout Monday, many thermal power plants remained offline, as freeze-offs + fuel shortages in gas pipelines forced large numbers of natural gas plants offline. Many coal plants likely struggled as well w/frozen coal piles, but breakdown of thermal outages by fuel type unclear

In short, ALL generation types are getting hammered. This is an equal opportunity "clusterfuzzle" as @gmbutts put it. So put aside your technology favoratism and tech tribalism for today please!

So in sum, total thermal generation outages of 25,000-30,000+ MW during the past 36 hours are more than DOUBLE what ERCOT considered an "Extreme Generation Outages During Extreme Peak Load" event! That is where the disaster is stemming from. (Wind underperformance is secondary).

Additionall, ERCOT predicted a seasonal peak demand of 57,699 MW with a "Extreme Peak Load" scenario adding 9,509 MW to that, for a total "extreme" scenario of 67,208 MW. Reality: On Sunday night, ERCOT recorded a new peak winter 69,150 Megawatts between 6 and 7 p.m on 2/14!

So what is leading to widespread and long-lasting electricity outages in Texas? 1. Total electricity demand was ~3,000 MW over the "Extreme Peak Load" scenario ERCOT planned for. 2. Thermal power plant outages were 10,000-16,000 MW over the "Extreme Generator Outages" scenario.

Those two factors together account for the entirety of the 10,500-16,500 MW of emergency load shedding -- aka rolling (or not so rolling) blackouts that ERCOT has reported over the past 36 hours (see http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225244 … and http://www.ercot.com/news/releases/show/225210 …)

At times, wind + solar output was ~4,000-5,000 MW below what ERCOT was counting on them form, and that certainly is part of the story, but much smaller than the total thermal capacity outages, and also less prolonged. Much of the past 36 hours, wind+solar has exceeded 6,200 MW.

Finally, note that in addition to widespread blackouts from major generation failures, there are also localized power outages from transmission & distribution failures affecting numerous customers. Downed lines, overloaded transformers, etc. Networks also fail in extreme weather.