A little info for the thread albeit a day or two late..........
Showing the ERCOT boundaries [in blue] where the rolling blackouts occurred.
ERCOT in relation to the rest of the US as far as electric grids are concerned. Texas chose to remain instate with their grid with no major ties to other US grids to keep the FERC out of controlling the grid.
Power outages unlikely, but not impossible
begin snip
Wednesday’s rolling blackouts were not caused by a failure to predict demand accurately or to keep enough plants online, Doggett said, but by a widespread mechanical failure of more than 50 power generating units all over the state.
There was no single reason for the failures and no particular location, plant operator or type of power plant behind the problem, he said.
Re-evaluating procedures
Frozen water pipes burst in some instances, but many of the problems emerged as ice locked up equipment that sends signals to valves, pumps and other devices, Doggett said.
Most power plant operators in Texas winterize their plants to handle cold snaps, but it’s clear that more could be done, he said.
“We will be looking at whether tighter restrictions should be applied on those plants,” he said.
end snip.......
Wednesday’s rolling blackouts were not caused by a failure to predict demand accurately or to keep enough plants online, Doggett said, but by a widespread mechanical failure of more than 50 power generating units all over the state. There was no single reason for the failures and no particular location, plant operator or type of power plant behind the problem, he said.
I'm glad that you posted that. Being in the industry, I am familiar with these kinds of situations. Equipment fails all the time, but the level of redundancy in the industry makes most events go unnoticed. I remember a couple of years ago losing 2400 MW of generation at the same time - the eastern interconnection absorbed the hit, and the entity that lost the generation was able to bring on fast-start gas turbines and pumped-hydro generation to replace the enormous loss within 10 minutes.
The problem in this case is the quantity of failures, and the inability to get adequate recovery resources on line. From what I recall reading in other threads, a few coal-fired plants had problems and were taken off line or tripped off line. Then, many of the gas turbines that are used to recover from these events failed to start due to cold weather issues.
By the way, a few of the rolling blackouts were in areas of Texas that were not part of ERCOT - El Paso had issues, and they are actually in the Western Interconnection. But they are remote, with apparently inadequate tie connections to the rest of the interconnection so they were not able to garner sufficient resources to supply their customer demand.
The lessons in this event will undoubtedly surround winterizing equipment to a greater extent, not relying too much on uncontrollable resources like wind power (and I have no idea how effective wind generation was during these last few days). In addition, a couple of high-capacity DC ties to the eastern or western interconnection might be a result of this event.