ERCOT and PUC Actions Don’t Match Words on Grid Reliability

On the evening of Sept. 6 last year, ERCOT declared an Energy Emergency Alert for the first time since February 2021. Frequency dropped to dangerous levels, and ERCOT was close to ordering rolling outages. But batteries surged to an all-time record, narrowly staving off a catastrophe.

On Sept. 7, I posed a series of questions about the incident and the grid more broadly. The last was this: “Perhaps most importantly, are there strategies they can implement to prevent this kind of curtailment in the future?”

ERCOT and the PUC are only just now seriously discussing the solutions. The situation couldn’t be more urgent…