Extremely Cold Weather Resulted In Rolling Blackout in Texas

A rare extreme winter hit Texas this week.  It made ERCOT scramble for power but ended up with a massive and prolonged rolling blackouts.  Over 30,000 MW of both renewables and thermal power plants were off-line causing businesses and households to be out of electricity, approximately 16,500 MW.   The Gas Delivery Emergency Order to ensure gas supply for power plants did not appear to help.

Day-ahead power prices in ERCOT spiked up to $8,000/MWh and the real-time price hit the price cap of $9,000/MWh.  No doubt that anyone kept the lights on during this period without any fixed electricity price contract will face with an enormous electricity bill.   Questions arose as to whether having capacity obligations and more interconnection capability with the rest of the U.S. would help.  The capacity obligation will force suppliers and generators to have capacity available when the demand needs it, otherwise it would face with a huge penalty.

The figure below only shows the average day-ahead LMPs in ERCOT from February 11-16 2021.