Energy Law

ERCOT blames inaccurate wind predictions for February emergency event

By Amanda Frazier

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) recently released its Operations Report to explain why it was forced to cut electric supply to interruptible customers on February 26, 2008. The emergency event was caused largely by the convergence of the normal rapid load growth that occurs around 6:00 p.m. and a simultaneous unexpected and sudden drop in wind that decreased the power output from windfarms.

ERCOT was primarily relying on day-ahead schedules to judge wind capacity, which predicted 1294 MW. However, only 335 MW were actually available during the relevant hour. To address this problem, ERCOT stated it would try to adopt in the near term the generation forecasting model it will use when the market transfers to a nodal operating system in 2009, since that model creates more accurate short term planning values for wind generation.

Managing reliable integration of wind generation is a high priority for ERCOT, since Texas is now the state with the largest wind energy production in the United States and has almost 3000 MW of additional wind development with signed interconnection agreements waiting to come online.

Full post as published by Energy Legal Blog on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).