"We hope to better understand whether there are any commonalities in those unplanned outages due to things like supply chain issues or routine maintenance delays resulting from the February winter storm," ERCOT spokeswoman Leslie Sopko said in a statement.īut some observers said the fact that ERCOT and the Texas Public Utility Commission - which oversees ERCOT - are in the dark about what happened isn't reassuring. But the agency has said it's investigating the issue and has submitted official requests for information to the plant operators. The information that ERCOT released doesn't include details of what caused the June outages. Many more individual generation units - a total of 585 - suffered outages or reduced output during the February freeze than the 155 that went offline June 12-17. Overall, there were nearly 1,300 unplanned outages at generation units during June, although that figure includes multiple outages reported for the same generators. Greg Abbott draws fire for leaving Texas power grid off special session agenda The natural gas and coal generators with repeat problems have a combined capacity of more than 14,000 megawatts, while those powered by wind and solar energy have a combined capacity of about 6,800. Units powered by natural gas and coal have a higher generating capacity on average than those powered by wind and solar energy. The generators that had unplanned outages beginning June 12-17 and during the February freeze are key components of power plants owned by Fortune 500 companies, such as NRG, Calpine and Vistra, as well by municipalities, electric cooperatives and other entities around the state. The price shot up to $1,828.65 per megawatt-hour on June 13 and $1,952.86 on June 14 after topping out at $31.52 on June 11. Wholesale prices on the deregulated ERCOT power market soared last month when it appeared electricity was in short supply relative to demand. "It suggests (the plants') maintenance standards are inferior to what should be the norm." "But the fact that these same plants went offline in normal weather (for June) means their problems go beyond insufficient weatherization for freezing temperatures and perhaps reveals an underlying lack of sufficient maintenance," Jones said. "In February, you at least had the excuse that we were experiencing temperatures that were extremely rare for the state," said Mark Jones, senior research fellow at the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs.
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