MemphisAg1 said:
For those that know, is the basic story that federal restrictions on natural gas or coal power plants have restrained power generation capacity from keeping up with the demand of a growing population?
That's the vibe I get from the comments of people who actually seem to know what they're talking about.
Or is there a different issue at play here?
It's not the weather... it gets hot in Texas... no surprise there.
There was a generator at a coal plant that caught on fire southwest of Houston, that's probably going to take a while to fix.
There are also a number of plants offline for maintenance, that happens every spring and every fall.
There were 5 plants that tripped offline yesterday, don't know the details on those, but generally speaking those are fixed pretty quickly.
Looking at the ERCOT graphs we should have close to 80k MW available during the summer and today we will have a little over 70k MW available, the demand is expected to be around 68k MW this afternoon and they would like to have a larger reserve available.