Comment by vel0city
2 years ago
ERCOT is not "the power company". They're the marketplace where many power companies exchange. And they probably do know a bit of what happened but aren't going to share preliminary information until deeper analysis is complete.
The power marketplace company should actually have better information on questions like “did a powerplant selling into the market go offline” than anyone except the plant operator, and should have more information about the impact than anyone.
It depends on how they're joined to the "grid" - if a company running multiple plants is providing 10 GW and later is providing 9900 MW did a plant go offline? Did clouds obscure solar? Did the wind die down?
ERCOT already has information about location-specific supply and demand: https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/contours/rtmLmp.html
And we don't know if they do or don't have that information, they haven't said either way. So its a bit early to complain about them not knowing something when we don't know if they know or not.
If they truly don't know, then that's a problem. If they do know but are waiting to release information until they know all the facts, that's probably fine.
That’s a good point.
On a re-read, the article does mention that the speculation of power plant failure is coming from outsiders on Twitter, so we don’t know whether the observability is there or not